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CAST AND CREW TAKE US BEHIND THE SCENES

OF THE SUPERNATURAL BLOCKSUSTER

AL JOURGENSEN ON

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THE HISTORY OF

CROWN INTERNATIONAL

PICTURES, AND MORE! FINAL ALBUM Cuban zombies!

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FROM THE MAKERS OF
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“A SURREPTITIOUSLY INTELLIGENT CACHE OF
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THE SPIRITS or 'OS

Thirty years ago, Steven Spielberg and Tobe Hooper
crafted a suburban spookshow that became legendary for
both its onscreen effects and off-screen drama. We gather
cast and crew to relive Poltergeist.

PLUS! Oscar-winning sound designers Alan Howarth and
Mark Mangini reveal the bizarre bag of tricks they used to
create the film's ear-tingling effects,
by MICHAEL DOYLE

Pue Morgue explores the history of Crown International
Pictures, a pioneering company in the world of American
exploitation cinema.

PLUS! Legendary producer David Friedman recalls the
unforgettable night Blood Feast premiered at the drive-in,
and the “King of the Bs" receives the royal treatment in
Corman 's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel.

by DAVID KONOW, CHRIS POGGIALI,

ERIC S. EICHELBERGER and STUART F. ANDREWS

Industrial metal messiah Al Jourgensen
discusses cheating death, bleeding out
and rarin' for a Relapse.

by TREVOR TUMINSKI

Juan of the Dead director Alejandro Brugu^s explains
how art imitates life in Cuba’s first zombie movie.

by SEAN PLUMMER

THE GORE-MET 54

MENU; Bane, Crowbar and The
Eleventh Aggression.

AUDIO DROME 57
NOW PLAYING; Daniel Licht.

PLAY DEAD 60

FEATURING; ZombiesH! Mobile Edition,
The Darkness II, and more!

CUSSIC CUT 62 .

.Beowulf, i .

BDWEN'S BASEMENT 44

DUG UP; The Boogens.

BLOOD IN FOUR COLOURS 46
INKED IN; Dear Creature.

THE CORONER’S REPORT 12
Weird stats, morbid facts and more.

NEEDFUL THINGS 14

Strange trinkets from our bazaar of the bizarre.
CINEMACABRE 36

The latest films, the newest home video releases,
reissues, and more!

THE UTE-NITE ARCHIVE 43

IN THE VAULT; Ghost ofDragsthp Hollow.

I UTIRTMIHTS

NOTE FROM UNDERGROUND 6
Dear Drive-in.

POST-MORTEM 7

Letters from fans, readers and weirdos.
DREADLINES 8

News highlights, horror happenings.

THE NINTH CIRCLE 48
SPOTLIGHT; Sarah Pinborough.
THE FRIGHT GALLERY 52
ON DISPLAY: Chrls Roberts.

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I fell in love under the stars last summer.

Yessir, that's when I rediscovered my affection for drive-in, movies after not having been to one since
I saw a triple bill that featured r/?e Craft That was back in Edmonton, Alberta, and, being that
far north, it got chilly after sunset (even during warm days), mosquitoes made it tiieir mission to annoy
and the summer nights are short - so short that halfway through the final film the sun came up, turning the
screen white and obliterating my view of Neve Campbell and Fairuza Balk in schoolgirl uniforms. And that's
just unacceptable.

It’s not so surprising that there aren't any drive-ins left in Alberta. (FYI: Wikipedia notes that last year there
were 371 drive-ins remaining in America; I’d estimate there are less than a tenth of that in Canada.) Having
moved to Ontario’s warmer climes, I felt like I should visit one of these curiosities before they’re extinct.

But before I go further, a little drive-in history. After a few years of experimenting with the ideal set-up,
Richard M. Hollingshead, Jr., a chemical company magnate, opened the first drive-in on June 6, 1933, in New
Jersey, it could accommodate 400 cars and had a screen that was 40 by 50 feet (1 2 by 15 metres). Sound
was transmitted by large outdoor speakers, which were later changed to smaller speakers that you’d hang in
your vehicle window, and then finally the soundtrack was piped directly into car radios via a low-frequency
transmission.

Drive-ins peaked in the late-’50s/early ’60s, with, according to Wikipedia again, approximately 4000 of them
operating throughout the US. Teens flocked there (where else could you have privacy on a date back in those
days?), and they were eventually labelled "passion pits” by the media. As they became less of a family expe-
rience, the theatres embraced exploitation films, which worked well for a while. As late producer David Friedman
recalls in this issue, the premiere of Blood Feast was marked by traffic jams, police and suspicion that the
gore was real. That’s about as exciting as exploitation gets.

Eventually, though, convenient multiplexes with better sound systems, urban sprawl and more home-viewing
options decimated the drive-in. These days, you mainly see overgrown lots with dilapidated screens consumed
by rust and graffiti, standing against the skyiine like part of a modern Stonehenge. As the many websites ded-
icated to memorializing closed drive-ins suggest, however, there’s no shortage of nostalgia for them.

The owners of the outdoor theatre that 1 decided to make my return to, the 50-year-old 5 Drive-In, understand
this well. Their neon signs blaze through the night, the retro snack bar is inviting, and fantastic vintage re-
freshment ads are screened before the features. When I went, the place was alive with families, giggling teens
and couples, who were not only there for the value of a double-feature, but also the ability to control their
viewing experience. 1 think this is why the drive-in could be poised for a bit of a comeback, and should appeal
especially to horror fans, beyond reasons of nostalgia.

Y’see, horror offers two very different viewing experiences in a way that other genres do not. There’s the
obvious one, in which you shut out the rest of the world and immerse yourself in the narrative on the screen
that will hopefully rock you with plenty of thrills and chills. The other experience is the opposite - it’s all about
the distractions off the screen. This is why drive-in horror was so popular with teens of decades past. As a rite
of passage, kids don't so much watch horror films as endure them to prove to their peers that they can take
it. Teens talk, laugh and, nowadays, screw around with their phones during movies because they don’t want
to give themselves over to the fictional horrors, or at least enough to be overtaken by genuine fear.

Drive-ins allow for multiple viewing options. You can shut yourself in your car with a great sound system
and concentrate on the movie, or be as social in there as you want without bothering your neighbours. You can
sit outside, hear others reacting to the movie, look away at the odd shooting star, take in the night air (infused
with wafts of pot smoke) and go for a walk if you're restless... or maybe even a little scared.

I love the collective movie experience, so my three trips to the drive-in last summer meant going in a group,
bringing camping chairs and a blanket to share with the girlfriend, sneaking in some beer, buying popcorn,
and generally soaking up the sights and sounds both on and off the screen. (That double bill of Rise of the
Planet of the Apes and Fright Nightwas the perfect end to both summer and the Festival of Fear weekend.)

The heyday, when exploitation companies such as Crown International and AlP caused a stir, may be long
gone, but if you’ve never been to a drive-in, or not for a long time, make it happen. If you’re like me, you might
fall in love all over again. And at the very least, you won’t have to tell some asshole in front of you to shut off
his phone.

RON MCKENZIE APRIL SNELLINGS

FX: 905-985-4195
E: Jo<3y@nje-(iiorgue.com

facebook-com/RueMorgueBance

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COmtBUTORS

STUART F. ANDREWS
BRENTON BENT7
A.S. BERMAN
LYLE BLACKBURN
JOHN W. BOWEN
PHIL BROWN
JAMES BURRELL
PEDRO CABEZUELO
PAUL CORUPE
MICHAEL DOYLE
ERICS. EICHELBERGER
JAY FOSGin
THE GORE-MET

PETER GUTIERREZ
MARK R. HASAN
DAVID KONOW
LAST CHANCE LANCE
ANDREW LEE
AARON VON LUPTON
MICHAEL MITCHELL
GEORGE PACHECO
SEAN PLUMMER
CHRIS P.OGGIALI
GARY PULLIN
JESSASOBCZUK
TALZIMERMAN

RUB MORGUE #121 would not have been possible
without the valuable assistance of Craig Reardon,
Mary-Beth Hollyer, Al McMullan and Dracula's Dog.

Design by Justin Erickson.

Rue Morgue Uaga2ine is publi’sheb monitily (with the exception of February)
and accepts no responsibility for unsolicned manuscripts, i^tos, art or other
materials. Freelance submtssions accompanied by S Jt.S.E. will be seriousiy
idand.lfn£ ' '

dave@rue-morgue.com

ncial support of the Government of Canada
sdical Fund (CPF) for our publishing acdvilies.
ie#121 ISSN1481-1103
Agreement No. 40033764
Entire contents copyright MAfiRS MEDIA INC. 2012.

R MI^

Bi’liillliBIHEn

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WEEKLY ON OUR FACEBOOK PAGE

WOULD YOU RATHER have an Uncle
Fester or a Grandpa Munster?

How is this even a question? Grandpa Munster for
sure! I always felt like Fester was the least inter-
esting of the Addams clan.

ANGELICA VON MUNSTER

Uncle Fester all the way! The Addams Family was
way funnier than The Munsters AND you’d never
need a flashlight while Fester was around!

ROB MORGANBESSER

While I love them both, if pressed, I choose
Grandpa! Me has magic pills and an awesome lab;
Uncle Fester is only good for explosives and the x-
casional light bulb trick.

A2RAELRENEA

Grandpa could get cranky at times, and tended to
lose focus on his family when he was obsessed
with his experiments and such. Fester never fal-
tered when it came to family; his explosives and
blunderbuss were always ready to do business.

CLAYTON GEORGE

Clearly an unfair question for the Rue Morgue au-
dience.

MIKE NOZFERATU

OST.MOiaTH

SLJ

Mi*

graphic news media, while looking down on those
who watch horror films. The lesson became a lively
discussion about the moral differences between real-
life violence and fictional violence, and I left school at
the end of the week with the hope that my students
become more conscious of what kind of violence they
choose to watch and why.

JACQUELINE RUBIO - WINDERMERE, FLORIDA

I M A-- "'ING “- riXA kUEBLER asks for the
review assignments. I went back and re-read
all her Twilight reV\em and she tries really hard to
sound like a hater, but judging by her latest review of
Breaking Dawn - Part 1, her true colours have come
out, She is in fact aTwi-hard! There is nothing wrong
with being a Twilightian but the movies don’t belong
in the hallowed pages of my favourite horror mag. So
please, Monica, for the last review of your favourite
movie franchise, tt 7 watching it high. Trust me, they
are phenomenal.

NATHAN LEE - ADDRESS WITHHELD

[FYI, Monica’s actual favourite horror movie franchise
is The Evil Dead - Ed]

lilL SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE screening was
one of the best CineMacabre Movie Nights ever. Even
with some tech challenges, the Amy Holden Jones in-
terview was awesome. Huge thanks!

PAT LIGHTHELP, VIA FACEBOOK

LOVE YOUR MAGAZINE It has great content, and is
just plain great. It has well-written reviews and intro-
duces me to many great movies. I started reading
your magazine around RMfflOS, and have gotten
every edition since. Anyways, I was wondering if you
could do an issue on German gore films such as Vio-
lent Sh*t and its sequels Premutos.The Lord of the
Living Dead, Zombie '90, The Burning Moon, Nekro-
mantik, etc. That would please me, as I love German
horror films.

DECUN HURLEY - WILLIAMSVILLE, NEW YORK

I FifiAilY FOUND IT, that movie with the giant rats
that kill... Deadly Eyes. Thank you Sick Top Six No-
vember 201 1 , my life can now go on.

SEAN UUBER, VIA FACEBOOK

I RECl.’.TLY SAW CHILLERAMA, the new horror an-
thology, which features a photo of the great film-
maker Orson Welles on a wall in the film. This movie
is supposed to be an homage to Orson Welles and to
the horror genre? What a crock! It’s no Citizen Kane,
that’s for sure. Chillerama is a so-called “fear film”
that ranks as one of the worst movies I have ever
seen, and is an insult to Orson Welles.

T.B.S. - GOOSE CREEK, SOUTH CAROLINA

IT’S OFFICIALLY MARCH 1ST. which means Febru-
ary’s ©RueMorgue drought is over! Bring on Weird
Stats & Morbid Facts and Bowen’s Basement!

©JAYSOTKOWY, VIA TWITTER

I WAS BUMMED OU1 to learn that the message
boards on rue-morgue.com have been removed and
on top of that I was not overly awed by your recent
design revamp of the website. And it was all happen-
ing during your issue-less month of February. As I was
clamouring for the new Rue Morgue, I couldn’t help
but think, “Is the magazine still going to be good?”
But after reading Dave’s latest editorial, it's clear that
Rue is still on the same page as it has aiways been,
and I believe that your continued honest communica-
tion with your readers is one of your strong points as
an indie publication. Oh, and RM»120 was fantastic
- maybe sameness is lameness after all! I didn’t miss
any of the newly departed columns and the new sec-
tions really pack a wallop. Excited to see Justin Er-
ickson throw some creative weight around as I’ve
been a fan for a while now.

ANTHONY DIBATISTA - HAMILTON, ONTARIO

lUST PICKED UP the new issue and I’m delighted to
discover a great review for my new book. Rough Cut
(RM#120). Wow, and thanks!

BRIAN PINKERTON

@RUEMOflGUL, way to go on the new website design
guys! A freakin’ plus from this fan.

©STRANGEKIDSCLUB, VIA TWITTER

I’M NOT A BIG FAN of the new website. Like the old
saying goes, "If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

KEVIN ZACHARY SERRICK, VIA FACEBOOK

I AM READING ©RueMorgue Jan/Feb edition. It’s
gone a little Hollywood.

©MC.JANINE, VIA TWITTER

ONE OF ThF THINGS I like most about being a high
school English teacher is that, even though there are
certain skills I am supposed to teach my students, I
have a fair amount of freedom in choosing the mate-
rials I use to teach those skills. I recently gave Dave’s
Note from Underground, Hypocrites and Horror Fans
to my tenth-grade students because 1
thought it was a great piece for teaching the concept
of author’s purpose: I aiso thought it was important,
however, to point out the hypocrisy of those who in-
dulge In sadistic voyeurism by watching increasingly

RUE MORGUE 3121, with an Arrow Vid article on “the
Art of Arrow"- apparently my Demons cover is on the
contents page! Totally rad!

JEFF ZORNOW, VIA FACEBOOK

BOUSMAN LAUNCHES M m’S CAKIIIYAL FILM TOUR

The mskers of Repo! The Genetic Opera return with The Devil's Carnival.

Carnival. Bousman found one investor, whose funds the director matched out of his
own pocket. The result is a low-budget labour of love that will hopefully accomplish
two things.

“Number one, it’s a cleansing of our souls," Bousman says. “It’s something that we
want to do, where we’re not having to adhere to what people want us to do or not do.
Number two, we wanted to make this whole event an experience. Going to the movies
used to be an experience, but now it’s turned into a bunch of douchebags talking on
their cellphones the entire time. I remember when I saw Rockythe first time - it was
awesome. That’s what we want; we want to make it an experience that you can share
with like-minded people."

And it’s an experience that can't be downloaded. Bousman adds. Since The Devil's
Carnivafs live aspects - audience participation, sing-alongs, Q&As, costume contests,
carnival-style performances and door prizes - are as crucial to the road show as the
movie itself, the filmmaker hopes to trump the online film piracy having an impact on
movie attendance.

Bousman admits that The Devil's Camivalls a risky venture, but he hopes audiences
will respond with enough enthusiasm to do it all over again.

"My ultimate goal is for this to be a series,” he says. “We already have a couple more
written, and we have a ‘bible’ for what would be the first season. It’s a stick of dynamite.
It could explode, or it could fizzle out. Obviously, we think It's going to explode - that's
why we're doing it - but you never know."

A complete list of tour dates and ticket information is available at
thedevilscarnival.com.

APRIL SNELLINGS

How do you fight pirates? With strippers and sword-swallowers, of course. In a move
designed in part to thwart internet movie piracy, the creative team behind 2008’s Repo!
The Genetic Opera are hitting the road with The Devil’s Carnival, a raucous touring show
that combines film, music, audience participation and live performances by burlesque
dancers, contortionists and other carnie mainstays. The show kicks off this month in
Hollywood and will hit a number of US and Canadian cities before winding down in May.

TTiough it's being called a sequel to Repo!, Cam/va/ actually bears no thematic or
narrative connection to the bloody rock opera. “The only connection is the insane team
that worked on it and the same kind of ‘fuck you’ attitude,” says Darren Lynn Bousman,
who directed both films. “It’s a musical, obviously, and Repo! ms a musical as well.
But It’s a completely different story. We have most of the Repo! cast returning, from
Paul Sorvino to Alexa Vega to Bill Moseley to [NIvek] Ogre, but they play different char-
acters and ft takes place in an entirely new and different world, which is Hell. ”

Besides the long list of flepo.'veterans. The Devil’s Cam/Va/also features dark-cabaret
darling Emilie Autumn, Boondocks Sa/nte star Sean Patrick Flanery and metal act Slip-
knot’s Shawn Crahan. The plot centres on the eponymous show, run by 01’ Scratch
himself, which characters are doomed to join
if they don’t earn redemption for whatever
sins landed them in Hell to begin with. Bous-
man describes the hour-long film as dark and
macabre, calling it “Tales from the Crypt
meets the anti-G/ee.’’

Though work on The Devil's Carnival
began in earnest only about nine months ago,
the idea was born soon after Repo! was re-
leased. Though it earned scathing reviews
and bombed in its two-city, blink-and-you-
missed-it release, flepo.'found an exuberant
afterlife when Bousman and writer/star Ter-
rance Zdunich decided to take it on the road
themselves. The pair essentially drove a print
across the US, renting theatres and showing
the movie.

“Fans embraced it," Bousman explains.
“We sold out every single show that we did,
with no publicity and no promotion. We were
just a couple of dudes on Myspace, and we
sold out every single screening. It was the
most rewarding experience I'd ever had, and
almost immediately we started looking to do
it again."

As usual with indie filmmaking, the prob-
lem was funding. The duo had approximately $12 million at their disposal when they
made Repo!, but no one was lining up to write cheques when it was time to finance

• • •

DItEADLIIIES

DARK HORSE REVIVES mm SUMMER LAUNCH ^

Almost half a century after It helped stitch together an entire generation
of Monster Kids, seminal horror comics magazine Eerie will soon be re-
joining its twisted sister, Creepy, on comics stands. Scheduled for a July
debut, the new Eerie, published by Dark Horse, will feature a mix of original
science fiction-tinged horror stories and reprints of tales from the maga-
zine’s heyday.

According to editor Dan Braun, Eerie will test the waters with old-school,
black and white interior art and a quarterly publishing schedule. “We’ll do
the first four issues and see what the response is,” he says. “If it goes
well, we're discussing the idea of going full-colour. That might be a shock
for the traditionalists, but in later issues of the original run of Eerie, there
were astounding colour sections by Richard Corben, so it's not without
precedent."

The original Eerie launched in 1 966 and ran for 1 39 issues. Since it was
technically a magazine and not a comic book, the Warren Publications title
didn't fall under the constraints of the Comics Code Authority. Along with
Warren’s similarly formatted Creepy and Vampirella, Eerie is often credited
with keeping horror comics alive during the years of heavy censorship that
followed 1954's Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. All three
titles folded in 1983, when Warren filed for bankruptcy.

For years afterward, rights to the titles were mired in complex legal dis-
putes. Braun says that he and his partners, who Include his twin brother
Josh, first flirted with the idea of acquiring
rights to fer/eand Creepy in 2009. It took seven
years of false starts and gruelling negotiations
with James Warren himself fo finally gain con-
trol of the titles, and the vast library of material
from their original runs, which are being
reprinted in Dark Horse’s award-winning
Creepy and Eerie Archives series.

“There are so many legends and myths about
this man, but I can tell you that he is someone
I respect deeply and I’m quite fond of him,"

Braun says of Warren. "That said, he did put me
through some hell over those seven years, but
I have to believe that a certain part of his moti-
vation was legacy. When the first hardcover
archive came out [Creepy Archives Vol. Jj, I got
an amazing message from Jim saying that the
volume brought tears to his eyes and that he
didn’t know how it could be done any better.

That affirmation was enough for me to feel validated for that seven-year
struggle. And the Eisner Award I won for best archival reissue in 2009
didn’t hurt, either."

The first issue of Eerie will feature a robot story by David Lapham, along
with what Braun describes as a “traditional but twisted, EC-style sci-fi"
story penned by Christopher Taylor, who scripted the disturbing clown yarn
“Commedia dell’Morte" for Creepy #6. While the original Eerie was known
as a vehicle for multi-part stories and reappearing characters, Braun and
Dark Horse are taking a different tack with the revamp.

“With a quarterly schedule, we didn’t want to focus on introducing char-
acters,” Braun explains. “But that’s not to say we might not do it in some

Twisted Sister: Jim Paveiec’s iilustratior} tor the first issue of the
relaunched Eerie, and (inset) interior art by David Lapham.

form later. If the book does well this year, then next year
we would consider expanding the page count, increasing
the frequency and using the title for characters and serials
again, but even with those ideas, it would still be focused
on sci-fi horror.”

If all goes well, you could be seeing the Eerie and Creepy brands in places
other than your local comics shop, too. Braun and his associates are working
with director Chris Columbus to develop a Creepy anthology film that will fea-
ture segments by four filmmakers, including Columbus himself. Braun says
that Adam Green is also involved, but details are still under wraps.

“The idea will be to bring in two other big directors on Chris’ level, and
then one independent or up-and-coming director. There's a lot of excite-
ment to see how stories and characters from the pages of Creepy ahd
Eerie might [translate to] film."

APRIL SNELLINGS

D.llEADlINtS

MmmTO BE ADAPTED AS NETFUX EXCLUSIVE

• 1^

Brian McGreevy’s dark, new-gothic novel Hemlock Grove alread'^
reads like a screenplay, so it's not surprising that his tale of a were-
wolf loose in a suburban Pennsylvania steel town Is being adapted
into a TV series for Netflix.

Hostel director Eli Roth has signed on as executive producer and
will direct thirteen hour-long episodes of Hemlock Grove as part of
the online streaming service’s foray into original programming. Mc-
Greevy and writing partner Lee Shipman are adapting the novel (out
now from Farrar. Straus and Giroux) for the screen, and it will debut
alongside other shows exclusive to Netflix, including David Fincher
and Kevin Spacey’s House of Cards and a new season of Arrested
Development

“When Netflix announced that they wanted to offer original pro-
gramming, that was a game-changer to every inventive-thinking
person in this industry," says McGreevy, who’s also currently working
on an adaptation of Dracula called Harker tor Leonardo DICaprio’s
Appian Way Productions. "What Uie migration of TV to the internet
provides is the opportunity to do an authentic version of the novel,
more so than any other outlet.’’

The story of Hemlock Grove begins with the discovery of the man-
gled remains of a teenage girl deep in the woods. Rumours swirl at
the local high school, and suspicion falls on a gypsy kid named Peter,
who has been telling freshman girls that he’s a werewolf. As more

mutilated bodies turn up, Peter finds
himself allied with a brooding, sexually
confused blueblood in a search for the

killer. Other story strands deal with*a
monstrous girl who glows In the dark, d,
mysterious biotech facility, angels ancF*
adulterers.

Incorporating elements of classic hor-
ror mythology, and modernized vampire
and werewolf folklore. McGreevy’s novel
is heavy on suspense, psychological ter-
ror. alienation and good old-fashioned
gore - elements that the writer says will
not be toned down for the series.

“Once I began to consider this as a se-
ries, people asked if - since this involves
adolescents and werewolves and vam-
pires - 1 was going to take things in more
of a PG direction,’’ he says. “My response
is that this story is about kids, it’s not tor
kids. ... Besides, compared to some of
the stuff that Eli has done, the book is
pretty PG."

An air date for Hemlock Grove has not
yet been announced.

DAN MURPHY

ENTRAILS

^ Simon Marsden, whose moody black
and white photography of abandoned cas-
tles and European ruins evoked another,
more supernatural world, died January 22
at age 63. Raised in purportedly haunted
Panton Hall and Thorpe Hall in England’s
Lincolnshire Wolds, Marsden found inspi-
ration in the literary works of M.R. James,
Arthur Machen and Edgar Allan Poe,
whose “dark tales of decaying mansions
and moonlit abbeys seemed somehow to
mirror my own obsession with the ghosts
that haunted them,” he wrote on his web-
site, simonmarsden.co.uk.

Actress Lina Romay, the long-time
muse and devoted common-law wife of
Spanish exploitation director Jess Ranco,
succumbed to cancer February 1 5 at age
57 Rrst teaming with Ranco for 1972‘s
The Erotic Rites of Franken-
stein, Romay starred in
more than 100 films
throughout her career. The
actress appeared at a piv-
otal point in Franco's life,
approximately one year
after the death of
his beloved
leading lady
Soledad Mi-
randa in

1 970. (The director often said he thought
Romay was a reincarnation.)

3 Charges filed against Spain’s Sitges In-
ternational Film Festival director Angel
Sala, for screening A Serbian Film in Oc-
tober 201 0, were dropped earlier this year.
Three showings of Srdjan Spasojevic's
grimy pornocaust flick led public prosecu-
tors to charge Sala with screening child
pornography, based on two notorious,
faked scenes. In a press release, the fes-
tival’s directors state that they are “com-
mitted to continuing the debate that has
emerged around the limits of film and
freedom of expression in a responsible
m^ner.’’

3 The resurrected Hammer growgirl
Rim Productions has an-
nounced that England’s Cin-
ema and Television History
Research Centre (CATH), lo-
cated in Leicester, will be ttie
home of a massive Hammer
archive. The publicly accessi-
ble collection is expected to contain the
screenplays from most of the company’s
film and TV productions from 1947 to
1990, as well as correspondence and
other related paperwork. This follows Jan-
uary's announcement of a worldwide

restoration project that will see more than
30 Hammer films restored and remas-
tered for Blu-ray release, complete with
newly shot extras produced by Marcus
Hearn, author of The Hammer Vault.

3 If you’re in the mood for doomsday, you
may want to pick up Elysian Brewing’s 1 2
Beers of the Apocalypse, with each beer
featuring label artwork reproduced from
Charles Burns' 2005 STD-as-mutation
graphic novel Black Hole. On the 21 st of
each month, you can drink to the end of
the Mayan calendar with brews such as
January's Nibiru - named after a myste-
rious planet ready to take out Earth - a
Belgian-style Tripel, or March's Fallout, a
pale ale made with green car-
damom.

3 Gotham recently published
Growgirl: How My Life After ffie
Blair Witch Project Went to Pot,
by The Blair Witch Project star
Heather Donahue, a quirky
memoir about leaving Holly-
wood to grow weed for fun and profit
After symbolically burning her acting-re-
lated mementos in the desert, Donahue
moved to a commune in rural California
and grew medical marijuana for a living.

A.S. BERMAN

The men responsible for the infa-
mous “Georgia Bigfoot Hoax" (in
which a frozen rubber suit was
claimed to be one of the creatures) re-
cently found themselves in another
heated situation as their Bigfoot-
Tracker RV caught fire and burned on
an interstate in Florida. The driver told
authorities they “were on a 36-stale
tour looking for Bigfoot." According to
BigfootTracker founder, Rick Dyer, the
2008 hoax was not their fault. He now
claims they had a real corpse but it
was collected by the FBI!

The internet was recently abuzz with
an enticing game-cam photo show-
ing the back of a mysterious hairy
beast. It was a refreshing change
from the usual blurred snapshot;
however it was soon identified as
being a still photo of the costume
used in the 2005 horror film, Clawed:
The Legend of Sasquatch. The
search continues...

LYLE BLACKBURN

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Joss Whedon, creator of TV shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and the movie The Cabin in
the Woods, admits to having a nightmare about walking through a forest alone at night and
being attacked by a floating witch.

A trio of California fifth-graders were expelled in February after allegedly attempting to kill their
teacher with rat poison for the second time in three months.

Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, was struck by lightning
twice during filming and suffered permanent scars to his back from being accidentally whipped.
Nintendo recently rejected a port of the cartoonish horror game The Binding of Isaac on religious
grounds. According to developer Edmund McMillen, the company claimed the action RPG - featuring
a young boy who must fight monsters in the labyrinthine basement of his home using household
items, after his mother tries to off him - contained “questionable religious content"

John Carpenter, a huge wrestling fan, first met “Rowdy” Roddy Piper at I987’s Wrestlemania III,
which led to the filmmaker casting him as the lead in They Uve (1988).

In February, a pair of plumbers were called to a Pennsylvania home to fix a backed-up toilet and
subsequently discovered a partially developed human fetus clogging the stack pipe.

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BRAIN POPPED AND PLOPPED BY ZOMBIE

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An embalmer from Denver, Colorado, stands accused of stealing gold crowns from the teeth of the
deceased that he processed and selling them to local pawn shops for more than $4000.

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Poe fans gathered outside the Baltimore cemetery where he is interred one last time this January,
in hopes that the “Poe Toaster" - a mysterious annual visitor (or visitors) to the author’s gravesite
for the past seven decades - would re-appear, but he didn't. He hasn’t been seen since 2009.

The Radnor Street Cemetery, in the English town of Swindon, recently developed a problem witfi
badgers, which have tunnelled beneath graves and brought human remains to the surface.

A fortysomething woman brandishing a semi-automatic pistol broke into a Texas residence earlier
this year and announced that she was there to kill the five-year-old child who lived in the home,
claiming he was the antichrist.

Greg Nicotero first met George A. Romero in Rome, while on a family vacation. The teenager
saw the director sitting beside him in a restaurant and mustered the courage to strike up a
conversation. Romero invited him to the set of Dawn of the Dead. Not long after, Nicotero de-
cided to drop med school to learn effects.

An Indonesian security guard was arrested on assault charges in January after kicking a costumed
woman, who he believed was an evil spirit, in the face in order to “save” an elevator full of people.

When a storage facility in Florida recently moved to evict a family's belongings due to non-
payment, the woman renting it told them they could not do so because her grandmother’s
corpse had been stored there since 1 995, a secret the woman’s mother had revealed to her on
her death bed.

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THIRTY YEARS AGO,

STEVEN SPIELBERG AND
TOBE HOOPER CRAFTED A
SUBURBAN SPOOKSHOW
THAT BECAME LEGENDARY
FOR BOTH ITS ONSCREEN
EFFECTS AND OFF-SCREEN
DRAMA. WE GATHER THE CAST
AND CREW TO RELIVE

HE YEAR 1982 WAS ARGUABLY THE MOST COMPETITIVE ONE IN THE
HISTORY OF GENRE CINEMA. Instant classics, neglected curios and outright
stinkers duked it out at the box office for every last cent. Along the way there
were some high-profile casualties C The Thing and Blade Runner being two fa-
mous examples) as a wrinkled alien with a glowing finger and benevolent dis-
position laid waste to the competition.

Emerging relatively unscathed was Poltergeist,
yet anoWier blockbuster offering from E. T. direc-
tor Steven Spielberg, which would become the
highest-grossing horror movie of the year. This
time, the Hollywood wunderkind would be col-
luding with a mild-mannered, cigarillo-smoking Texan named Tobe Hooper, the man
who had helmed the most gut-wrenching fear film of al| tinie, The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre. At first, they appeared an unlikely pairing but both shared a strong mutual,
respect. Spielberg had hailed TCM as "one of the most truly visceral movies ever
made. Essentially it starts inside the stomach and ends in the heart... I loved it."
With this endorsement still ringing in his ears, Hooper was understandably thrilled
at Spielberg's suggestion they work together on a film. But on what kind of film?

After the cancellation ,of Night Skies (a sci-fi horror movie that also featured a
family terrorized by malevolent forces), Spielberg was eager to find another project
that allowed him to explore his darker side. Hooper proposed a ghost story and thus
began one of the most controversial working relationships betvveen producer and
director. Although greatly preoccupied with the shooting of Raiders of the Lost Ark
and the development of £ T, Spielberg commissioned a script tiiat was derived from
his own initial ideas concerning a family besieged by spirits in their suburban tract
house. His treatment drew heavily on The Wizard ofOz, The Haunting and Richard
Matheson’s 1 962 TwiifghtZone episode "Little Girl Lost,” which alsb featured a fe-

tossed onto the ceiling of her bedroom and Carol Anne sucked into a portal in her
closet. The young girl disappears but her voice can be heard from inside the TV, so
the family calls in parapsychologists from the local university - Dr. Lesh (Beatrice
Straight), Marty (Martin Casella) and Ryan (Richard Lawson) - who determine that
the home is haunted by multiple ghosts. As Steven soon discovers, via his boss
Lewis Teague (Return of the Living Deads James Karen), the house was built on a
former cemetery. The researchers bring in Tangina Barrens (diminutive character
actor Zelda Rubinstein), who reveals that Carol Anne is being held by a demon called
The Beast They mount an inter-dimensional rescue mission as the spiteful forces
attempt to destroy them.

tensed from May to August of 1 981 , Po/ferge/sf finished shooting two days ahead
of schedule but twelve percent over budget, coming in at $1 0.8 million. Soon after
its June 4 release, rumours began to circulate that Spielberg had enjoyed more of
. a creafive hand in the authorship of ttie film than was first realized. The mud-slingers
alleged that he had been on set for all but three days of the twelve-week shoot. Fu-
elling the growing discontent was a trailer in which Spielberg's name appeared
tvvice as large as that of Hooper MGM was subseguently fined $1 5,000 by the Di-
rector's Guild of America, prompting Spielberg to take an ad out in Variety, praising
the “rather unique, creative collaboration” he experienced with his director.

Although debates persist over how much of Poitergeist is Hooper’s doing, one
thing is certain: in their'attempt to reinvigorate the haunted house formula as a

state-of-the-art FX extravaganza, both men delivered a carnival ride of wonderment
and visceral chills that has held audiences spellbound under its dark thrall for three
decades. Indeed, the film’s oft-quoted dialoglie has now entered the common ver-
nacular, with lines sueff as "They’re heee-ere” and "This house is clean” holding
the same currency as “Phone home” and “We’re gonna need a bigger boat!”

In preparing this article, several members of the production, including Hooper,
Nelson and cinematographer Matthew Leonetti, among others, either declined or
ignored requests for an interview. In spite of this reticence,. Rue Morgue has gathered
together several key conWbutors to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Polter-
geist co-wrIter Michael Grals (who also co-scripted Poltergeist II: The Other Side)]
actors Robins, Karen and Casella; makeup effects artist Craig Reardon; and sound
effects specialists Mark Mangini and Alan Howarth (see sidebar], all discuss the
film’s creation, controversies and lasting appeal.

male child disappearing through a bi-located hole into another dimension.

In this story, scripted by Spielberg, Mark Grais and Mark Victor, a serene California
suburb called Cuesta Verde becomes the setting for the haunting. Realtor Steven Freel-
ing (Craig T. Nelson), his wife Diane (JoBeth Williams) and their kids Dana (Dominique
Dunne, who was strangled to death by her boyfriend several monbis after the film came,
out), Robbie (Oliver Robins), and Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke, who starred in all three
PoltergeistfWm before dying at age twelve of a misdiagnosed bowel obstmetion) live
the prototypical Ameiican family life, until one night Carol Anne wakes up and starts
communicating with something inside a static-filled television screen, (Other actors
died shortly after making the film, as well, leading to talk of a ''Poltergeistoum.")

Soon, furniture is moving around, houseware spontaneously breaks, and die family
is attacked by malicious spirits. The most infamous scenes see Bobby grabbed by
the twisted, old tree in the backyard and attacked by a terrifying clown doll, Dana

You're Sitting Too Close: Steven (Craig T. Nelson) i^n&erswltaidM
(Heather 0 ’Rourke) sees in die TV, and (opposi^, clockwise from top) i
JoBeth Williams, O'Rourke, Oliver Robins and Dominique Dunne.

C. iirOBE HAD A HARD TIMl

THAT FILM. ITS TOUGH
WHEN THE PRODUCER IS.

N SET EVERY DAY

C LEWIS TEAGUED

How d/d Poltergeist happen /or jrou ?

MICHAEL GRAIS; Spielberg had read two scripts that I wrote with my ex-
partner [Mark Victor]. Death Hunt, which was a tough adventure drama based
on a true manhunt in Canada during the depression, and a mufti-character
comedy about air traffic cbntroliers called Turn Left or Die. He said the combi-
nation of tough action and character development in Death Hunt and the hu-
mour of Turn Left or Die convinced him that we were right for the project

OLIVER ROBINS: I went to this open cail with my mother who used to take
me to all my auditions. We had to wait in line for hours but after the first audition,
I had multiple call-backs before finally having the big test with Tobe. I remember
Tobe saying to me, “Oliver, the most important part of’doing a horror movie is
the scream. You must be able to scream because people have to feel scared."
I really didn’t know how to ^ream at all so I worked with a coach who showed
me the technique. I then went in, showed Tobe how terrified I could be and won
them over.

JAMES KAREN: Looking back, I think they had som'eb.ody else for the part
of Teague but he didn't come through. I don’t know who he was or what hap-
pened but you don’t cast a role that big at the last minute. After the first day of
shooting, Spielberg came over to me and said, "Glad to have you on board.” I
said, ’‘Thanks, but what made you cast me in biis part?” He said, “I was watch-
ing TV and came across a scene from Capricorn One where you played the Vice
President. You were so smarmy 1 thought, ‘That’s Mr. Teague!”’

MARTIN CJLSELLA: I’d been working for Steven as his assistant for three
years before deciding to quit and go back to acting. They were having trouble
finding -anybody for the role of Marty, who was originally an Asian character
named “Tak.” Then I was called in to audition on videotape and already being
familiar with the script I knew what was required of me - look scared and
breathe heavily. Steven later invited me to the first private screening of Raiders
and told me I’d gotten the role.

Grasp Of The Situation: (top to bottom) Steven Spielberg on set with James
Karen (middle) and Nelson, the producer’s hands in the mirror scene, and
Robbie tussles with the tree.

How fleahed out was SpieJberff's
treatment far the film?

MG: Steven's treatment was more a . series of
ideas and possible scenes. It was called It’s
Night Time. His idea of setting the story - in typ-
ical Spielberg fashion - in the suburbs was
unique, as was his idea of the ghosts coming
out of the TV. Ideas were evolving and we were
doing research into ghost catchers, hauntings,
etc., and watching horror movies. Tobe’s Texas

film I’d ever seen up un
point in time. I
“Whoa, Spielberg

horror- on this

one.” In order to make this film really differ-
ent - a la Tobe Hooper - we had to kill many
of the family membere! Spielberg recoiled at
that idea but said we could pick one person
to die and we said, “Carol Anne.” He told us,
smiling, we were sick but to proceed. We
didn’t kill her obviously and this solution to
killing her - having her disappear into an-
other dimension - came about in conversa-
tions with Spielberg.

Oneof the meet Aiffhtening scenes
is the tree crashing through the
window and eeixlng Robbie.

OR* That sequence took almost three weeks
to shoot. They made multiple trees and each
one had a different design and purpose. One
tree had long, extended arms that would
move; a second tree had a scary face carved
into it; another was designed to swallow me.
All of tiiese things were mechanical in-cam-
era effects and the challenge of bringing this
huge tree to life was complex, buttheV really
pulled it off. The stunt co-ordinator, Glenn
Randall, told me, “Now, Oliver, I want you to
cover your face when the tree arms come
reaching in because we are going to shoot
sugar-glass at you." It was an incredible ex-
perience. \'\\ never forget Tobe’s direction to
me was, “Big eyes! I want big eyes! Rernem-
ber, this is the most terrifying thing that has
ever happened to you!"

MG Thejree grabbing Robbie is based on
an incident that happened to me when I was
a small boy and woke up iri a .storm in our
house. Everybody-was gone - parents out
and sisters out on dates. I was sitting on the
landing, on the second floor of the house on
the stairs, when lightning struck the tree in
our yard. A huge branch crashed through the
window dose to where I was seated.

Poltergeist is f sixty restrained in
terms of gore but there is a grisly
moment when Marty haUudnaies
that he is clawing the flesh from
his own face

CRAIG REARDON: Originally, Marty was
to have careened into the bathroom to
splash some water on his face after seeing
the grotesquely haemorrhaging steak. When

^ Face Your Fears: The Beast confronts Steven, (inset) Craig Reardon 's unused
^ Lon Chaney-inspired Beast head, and Robbie turns his back on the clown doll.

he looked up at his reflection in the mirror, he would have seen a decaying corpse look-
ing back. This would have been a wonderful scare even if we’d done that; Mike Mc-
Cracken, my partner on the film, spitballed another approach. He said, “Wouldn’t it be
cool if the same thing that just happened to the steak happened to him?”

MC: Those are actually Steven's hands tearing the flesh from my fake head. I remember
handing him my wristwatch and ring to wear for the shot. I was watching him rip my
face apart and he was having a wonderful time!

enough theatrical malevolence mat even if glimpsed for a second it would terrify the
viewers. I'd hoped to come up with a visage that would scare a contemporary au-
dience the same way as Lon Chaney had done in his unmasking scene in The Phan-
tom of the Opera - a- landmark scare in horror film history -- and I think I did.
However, the filming of this creation, as handled by ILM, was so complicated in its
execution and different from the way I was told the shot would be composed that
it never delivered on the potential inherent in the head itself. I actually saw (he dis-
carded takes.They didn’t get it up there. The head was in effect thrown away. It
was my major disappointment in the film.

CR: I thought Spielberg would have fun doing it and, frankly, he would not be so dis-
pleased with the demolition work when he saw the dailies! The only quibble I have is
that the hands come up into shot at too straight an angle, but I couldn't see that as I
was seated directly behind Spielberg operating the mechanisms in the head.Tobe was
observing on a stepladder, urging us on, but I think he was so Involved in looking at the
face mat me inappropriate angle of Steven’s forearms was me last thing he was focused^
on. However, the general public were caught totally by surprise. At many screenings,
mat shot was the hit of the movie, which was certainly gratifying at me time.

Of course, the moment that dUstiUs every child's wmrst nightmare is
the clown attack.

OR: I tapped into my own personal fears for that because I was terrified of clowns, i
once had mis little Charlie Chaplin doll - and it wasn't the Chaplin that we all know and
love - it was this creepy pale-faced toy that used to sit on my shelf. It had mese weird
eyes mat seemed to follow me around. I was actually minking about how much mat
thing scared me^when we were shooting mat sequence. We finished it in just a couple
of hours and one of the tricks mey used was a reverse camera. When me clown
wrapped its arm around me I had to go from a very big emotion to a small one as the
clown arm was pulled away. It was simple but mat scene always scares people.

Is it true that you almost choked to death ahoot-
ing that gag but Sjdelberg noticed and quickly ^
interv&ied? / .

OR: I’ve heard that story but I don’t remember that /
at all. Honestly, I’m not sure what took place. If peo-
ple saw me being choked by me clown doll, then ■
maybe it did happen. I had such a good time on
Poltergeist I’ve probably repressed the memory. ,

There are a lot of things I can recall clearly, but mat '
isn’t one of them. Eimer way, it makes for a good
story and helps create a rnymology for the film.

Craig, what can you tell me about The .

Beast?

CR; The Beast was basically a disembodied head whose \
function was to scare the living hell out of me audience. It '
was to explode out from me luminous closet at me same point
where a large skull wim glowing eye-sockete now appears
instead. This is me work of Industrial Light & Magic. I had ^
noming to do wim it. During pre-production, I sketched
a number of alternative designs, one of which was pre-
ferred by Spielberg. A head was fashioned that had

^-"•7 7

1 ^#

Wbre there any other signiffcant scenes deleted horn the ffnal cut?

MC: in me film, you see Marty go upstairs tp investigate the sounds of footsteps
and Carol Anne crying. There was an extensive sequence that followed on from
there, which we shot on this little hallway set. I turn the handle of me bedroom
door but it just keeps turning and turning. Then the camera dollies in on my hand
as the door clicks, opens, and there is this gigantic wribosh! They had these big
wind machines that would blast in your face and blow your hair back. You see them
all through the movie when there's a big scare and I got some of that. Thenlhls
ghost suddenly lurches out of the bedroom and fifts me ten feet up in the ain It
bites me on the side as I’m screaming and writhing, then throws rrie down to the
floor. I was hanging by a harness on wires and the special effects guys had me
rigged with tubes underneath my clothing. Steven would say, “Okay, it’s biting you!"
I would be shrieking and the guys would push a button and this liquid' would ex-
plode out of my shirt in the shape of a giant ghost mouth. They called that gloop
“ghost saliva’’ but it looked more like semen.

Now, you only see the aftermath where I hurry
back downstairs and show Dr. Lesh and every-
body the bile-marks. By-the way, here's some >
trivia: Steven loves self-referential
jokes and the original climax of >
that scene had Robbie
""" ' staring at my bite-
marks before look-,
ing into the
camera and say-
ing, “(This place
has] jaws!”

JsaneB, Craig T. Nelson actually deUvers one of the stature lines of tte
movie to your character.

JH: "Yqu took away the headstones but you didn’t take the bodies!" I had prepared well for
diat scene where Craig grabs me and starts shoiding. t used an acting term called “As If." It
wa^ as if my best friend, my brother, had turned on me and said something dreadful that I
didn't want to hear. That technique made the scene woi1< well. It was a little method acting,
you know.JChuckles] There were some wonderful stories about JoBeth piliams] shootirtg
those scenes in the swimming pool with all the skulls popping up. 1 must tell you, seeing
those skeletons scared the bejesus out of mei You'd be standing there talking to. somebody
and suddenly this coffin would shoot out of the ground, the lid would fall open and ttiere'd be
this horrible corpse staring you right in the face.

I understand that real skeletons were used for the pool sequence. •

CR: Yes, real skeletons were Obtained to fabricate the cadavers, but let me explain why. Rrst
Of all, they were purchased as display skeletons through a high school and college lab supply
hduse. They were held together with springs, bolts and wire and were manufactured to hang
on stands as shidy tools in-classrooms. There w^alsothe option to purchase plastic replica
skeletons but they were twice as expensive and I was on a fairly tight budget, whatever might
be assumed to the contrary. More to the point, however, is thatthe plastic skeletons all looked
exactly alike. They had no personality, no individuality. On the'other hand, the human skeletons
that the company offered were very [nuch different one from the next. It was definitely the
right way to go and those genuine skeletons lent a special degree of creepiness to the com-
pleted props. By the way, very early on I discussed Tobe the appearance qf the cadavers,
.saying that I could make them realistic or EC Comics “realistic," meaning, of course, exag-
gerated and grotesque. This being a horror film and not a documentary, I was strongly inclined
to the latter approach and he agreed with me:

No discussion of Poltergeist is possible without mentioning the lingering
controversy over who actually directed it

MG: The Writers Guild was on strike during the shooting of Poltergeist, so I was outside
[MGM] carrying some sign, picketing my own film being shot on the lot. There are so- many
ironies in Hollywood. One of Spielberg's assistants came and got me and brought me onto
the set for a peek when they were shooting the ghost-rape scene. Tobe was sitting in the di-
rector’s chair and Steven was standing behind him and they were botii talking to people and
giving directions. It looked like Tobe was working with a skong producer who had a lot of
input into the film. The end result, when I saw it did appear to be way more Spielberg
than Hooper, but that's all I know.

Body Work: Craig Reardon touches up a
real skeleton, and (inset) Diane nearly
drowns with the dead.

MC: I don’t think anybody will mind this story being on-record be-
cause it’s been 30 years, The fir^ thing we shot was the

Cont'donp.22

O^CAk-WINNING sound
DESIGNERS ALAN HOWARTH
AND MARK MANGTNI REVEAL
THE BIZARRE BAG OF TRICKS
THEY USED TO CREATE THE
FILM’S EAR-TINGLING EFFECTS

BY MICHAEL DOYLE

I HE IMPORTANCE OF SOUND

I I EFFECTS IN ANY MOVIE

SEEMSI OBVIOUS, but audi-
ences and critics often turn a
deaf ear to the achievements
, of the artists who devise
them. Yet consider for a mo-
ment what An American Werewolf in Lon-
don would be without its bloodcurdling
howl? Or Fiend Without a Face robbed of
its dreadful throbbing pulse? Or even see-
ing Castle Frankenstein in a movie, minus
an accompaniment of nerve-shredding
thunderclaps?

Needless to say, the value of this cinem'atic craft is not lost on veteran
sound effects editor, Mark Mangini {Gremlins'. The 'Burbs, .The Misti. Back
in 1981 , he was one-third of the dynamic trio at Thundertracks, Ltd., the
most innovative sound effects company in Hollywood. Along witii partners
Richard L. Anderson and Stephen Hunter Flick, Mahgini helped create a
veritable aural compendium of the strange and terrifying for Poltergeist
Buoyed by their Oscar-winning efforts on Raiders of die Lost Ark, the team
divided the work equally between them. Each took four of the film's twelve
ten-minute reels and was tasked with designing, recording and editing all
of the sound effects contained within their respective sections.

Charged with realizing the sonic manifestations of ITie Beast, Mangini
began by recording “large animal sounds” at a California sanctuary. “The
big skull-head that comes leering out of the closet was a multi-layered
sound that included lions, tigers, elephants and the groans of humpback
whales,” he reveals. “These were edited on top of each other to create this
frightening multi-phonic-roar that would startle the audience. There was
also ‘The White Beast,’ which is the ghost-creature that terrorizes JoBeth
Williams in the hallway, That was specifically created only from lion and
tiger sounds. By using carefully edited snippets and simple tape manipu-
lation - speeding it up, slowing it down - wg got that unearthly feral sound."

Freelance sound effects specialist Alan Howarth (The Thing. They Live,
five of the Halloween sequels) also provided audio for a number of se-
quences. including “shrieks” for the skeletons that erupt out of the ground
during the climactic sequence ("I’m aware skeletons don't have vocal
cords," he concedes.)

“We continually wanted to make the sound effects organic," Howarth
professes. “These were literally tiie pioneering days. We were using ‘mod-
ern’ analog studio recording tape machines, reyerbs and mixers. This was

> 20

Scaring Up Sounds: (from L to ft) Noisemakeis Mark Mangini, Stephen Hunte r Flick and
Richard L Anderson, and (top) Diane meets The White Beast.

before digital sampling^ before computers
were in the studio. All of that was at a
very crude stage and Mark, Richard and
Stephen were still able to do incredible
work."

One of Howarth’s most iconic contribu-
tions to Poltergeistis Carol Anne’s ethe-
real voice calling out from the l
netherworld. “We met with Spielberg and '

I asked him what he had in mind,” he re- ^
calls. "He looked straight at me and said.

'Earth to Venus.’ I said, 'Fabulous,' walked
into the hallway and started to sweat! I
had no Idea what he was talking about. !
thought, ‘If I don’t get this right, I’ll never
work in this town again.’"

Howarth returned to his studio and
began experimenting with various tech-
niques In order to realize Spielberg's di-
rective. After several aborted attempts,
inspiration arrived from an unlikely
source. “I was travelling to [MGM) when
Led Zeppelin's ‘Whole Lotta Love' came
on the radio. 1 heard the break ini the
middle of the song where the band
stops and Robert Plant sings a cappella. The sound
of his voice is a pre-echo and was actually a tech-
nical mistake. It turns out that when he was in the
recording studio, there was a better take that was
bleeding over the headphones back into the track.
At that moment, I understood what ‘Earth to Venus'
meant. Spielberg was talking about sounds travel-
ling over a great distance. I then went back to my
studio and devised what you now hear in the
movie."

For the tree that abducts Robbie from his bed-
room, Mangini reused some of the animal sounds
accompanied by foghorn blasts that were slowed
down. (Howarth recalls that they were trying to cre-
ate noises that represented “wood stretching with-
out breaking.”)

"Poltergeist required designed sounds, things
you’d never heard before," Mangini insists. "We
were nuts back then about acquiring new sounds
and always wanted to be original in everything we
did. So we eschewed using sound libraries as much
as we could.”

Mangini remembers the incredible lengths they
would go to in order to discover the right sound. For
the sequences when characters would burst back
through the dimensional portal into the real world,
and were dripping with purplish ectoplasm, the men
filled balloons full of Jell-0 and threw them on the
ground or stabbed them to get the right sound.

"We tore the balloons apart and squeezed the stuff
out of them to get this extrusion sound,” recalls
Mangini. “Not satisfied with that, Stephen actually put
on a bathing suit and lathered some shaving cream on
his back. He was trying to get that suction-sound you
hear when your back is pressed against the wall of a
shower stall and you pull away. We could, suddenly hear
these great fart-like sounds!"

Things eventually became downright stomach-
churning in their search for the perfect effect. When
creating the noises for the crawling, spewing steak,
the men started playing with dead animals.

“That was the first time we experimented with
meat to make squishing noises," Howarth admits.

chuckling at the memory. “One of the greatest
sources for that is raw. chicken. For an entire ses-
sion we started fooling around with the innards, rip-
ping the flesh off and breaking the limbs. It was
disgusting- but we got these wonderfully gross
sounds!"

Really, the only way the sound effects crew
could’ve taken things further would be to record ac-
tual ghosts. Oh, wait... they tried that too. Mangini
explains that during the filming of Poltergeist, he
met a hypnotist who happened to head up the Para-
psychology Department at UCLA.

“He was going around the country investigating
hauntings and I thought, ‘I have to meet this guy.' 1
ended up going on five ghost hunts with him, and
even developed a four-channel recording system
that we could use to echo locate or triangulate the
presence of a spirit, should one manifest itself.
We'd then have high-fidelity audio proof of paranor-
mal activity occurring."

Yes, during the making of Poltergeist, Mangini
took his recording equipment out on real-life super-
natural stakeouts, in hopes of capturing something
he could use in the movie.

“These ghost hunts would involve me sitting in
the dark rooms of supposedly haunted houses with
all my equipment trying to document a haunting,"
he continues. “The hope was that I could go back to
my producer, Frank Marshall, and say, ‘I have the
sounds of actual ghosts to put in our film! You have
to put this in the advertisements - Poltergeist in-
cludes the sounds of real ghostsP I thought that
would have been one of the all-time great ad cam-
paigns in the history of horror films, which was aw-
fully sophomoric of me."

But the burning question remains: did Mangini suc-
cessfully document evidence of the supernatural?

He laughs at the notion: “All I succeeded in doing
' was recording a great deal of tape-hiss and scaring
the crap out of myself!” <5

21 J

YEARS or

What are yourmemories of your movie
sibling. Heather OTtourke?

4SPBE AND STEVEN

1 VERYTHING we are TERRI
OF WHEN WE ARE LITTLE

ibie When the coffee pot moves, I

scene at the dinner table when the coffee pot moves, I /A\ H 1^ (

take pictures and there's all that exposition about what ^ ^

might be going on in the house. That took all day to shoot because it was ^
six people sitting and talking and everybody had a close-up. Tobe and Steven almost
took turns directing us and would tell us different things. One would say, 1 want you to
do it like this,” and the other one would yell, ‘‘Cut! No, you should do it like this," They
would both come up and whisper directions to you, which were the exact opposite of
what the other had just said. Rnally, BeaWce [Straight] put her foot down and said,
"Hey, guys, one director please!” It wasn’t tiat Steven was trying to direct the movie,,
he was merely making suggestions. So much of PoltergeistlooVs and feels like a Spiel-
berg movie but my recollection is that Tobe was mostly directing.

CR: 1 was not on ttie set except when my contributions were scheduled to be filmed. I
did have one expenence where I showed Tobe a preliminary casting of the cancerous
steak - more or less executed as he'd requested - which was vetoed by Spielberg on
the spot because it no longer resembled a steak. Spielberg was anxious thattfie audi-
ence recognize that it was originally a simple steak and remained so. Accordingly, I
came up with the approach seen in the final film, including the idiosyncratic movement,
similar to some sort of awful worm. Although the first steak did not represent a killing
amount of work, it had consumed enough time and effort - none of which I could afford
to waste - that I determined in the future to make certain that whatever I prepped
would be approved in advance by Spielberg as well as Hooper.

JK: Tobe had a hard time on that film. It’s tough when the producer is on set every day
and there’s always been a lot of talk about that. I considered Tobe my director. That’s
my stand on all those rumoure. We don’t always have to laud Spielberg for R)l-
tergeist because Spielberg has every laud in the world, and rightly so. He's
not only a brilliant filmmaker, he’s a brilliant businessman too. and Tobe
is not. Tobe is very childlike and sweet in that area.

OR- The guy who sets up tiie shots, blocks the actors and works with .]
the crew to create a vision is the director. In those terms, Tobe was the
director. He was the one who directed me, anyway. The controversy .
comes from the fact that Steven co-wrote the screenplayand was the
producer. He fiad a vision for Poltergeist but Tobe made that vision his
own. Steven was on set because he had certain responsibilities, but they
both worked as a team. Don't forget, people enjoy scandal. It’s more
exciting to create some conspiracy theory and that often feeds
on itself. In reality, that never took place, as much as some
people want it to be true. Tobe was the director. I know it /V ^//
now as a professional filmmaker, but I also knew it back e
then as a kid. ' /.V

endearing, sweet girl who I be-
I'®''® SOfi® O'! achieve great things in her

life. She was very bright and talked about becoming a filmmaker herself
when she grew up. People have to remember this little girl was five years old when we
made Poltergeist It’s difficult enough when you’re an adult to take direction and un-
derstand what's going on so that you can channel all of your energies into the work,
but she did that. As a human being, separate from her professional capabilities, she
was a good-natured person. Her death was extremely traumatic for me. I grew up in
the suburbs and was very sheltered. Being young myself. I hadn’t really been exposed
to that much death, especially the death of somebody I knew so well. I was very sad at
the time and still am. I would love to have seen what Heather could have become. We
all lost out when she passed on. I

What about Zelda Rubinstein?

. JR Zelda was very funny, but she did get a bit difficult towards the end of her life. We
both attended the [25th] anniversary screening of Po!tergeist \r\ LA and she was a little
bitter that day. She laid into Tobe and I don’t know why. We’ve all had a wonderful run
on this movie and she had no right to do that becaose Tobe was kind to her. I mean,
Zelda continued to work after ftirterye/sfand had a good reputation. I remember she
always had a young boyfriend and would talk about how well hung he was. I once told
her, “A guy doesn’t have tobe too well hung for you, kiddo!" She got mad as hell at me
for that. [Laughs] My wife and 1 were great friends witii Zelda but then she got so mean
that we finally stopped seeing her. We really loved her, but she was unhappy. I think her
last years were spent in illness, physical pain and old age, and occasionally she struck
out at people. But she is such a wonderful force in Pottergeistarvi was a darling when
we shot the film. That's how I like to remember her. To tiiis day, whenever we walk into
'-.^^our house we say, “This house is clean!"

^ IVT^doTouthin/cPoltergeistreinainssopopular?

MG: I think Poltergeist was such a phenom because it didn’t take place in
a scary old haunted house [and] there was lots of humour in it. The first act
in my opinion is almost a comedy, and the characters are well drawn so you
‘ T care about them. That was unique to the gehfe at the time.

OR Although it’s a horror film, Fo/fe/ige/s/ celebrates life in questioning what
comes after death. It shows you the importance of valuing what’s important
mainly your family and the people you love. It helps you under-
stand that life is indeed finite.

MC: The fans were scared by the movie as children and
it's stayed with them all these years. Tobe and Steven
tapped into everything we are terrified of when we are
little. That ti-ee is going to bust tiirough my window
and grab me; that toy is going to come alive and pull
me under the bed; there’s a monster in my closet
that’s going to take me to some dark place where
no one will ever find me. A hundred years from
now, kids will still be scared of those things.
That’s where the true power of Poltergeist lies -
in the fears and dreams of childhood. Q

aJiliiTiir

»n:

1 /

D and

“

DAVID KONOW CHRIS POGQIALI

H orrible horrors, the gorehouse greats collection, savage cin-
ema. THE TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL COLLECTION. CULT TERROR CINEMA.

Look on the back of these DVD compilations and you'll see titles such as Stanley, The Van, Malibu
High, Horror High, Nightmare in Wax, Blood of Dracula's Castle and Don't Answer the Phone!
These are just a few of the 1 0O-plus mad movies released to theatres and drive-ins across Amer-
ica from the f 960s to the 1990s by Crown International Pictures, one of the best known low-budget B-
movie outfits in history.

The Beverly Hills-based company was founded by
Newton “Red" Jacobs in 1959. After a stint working at
RKO, Jacobs ran distribution house Favorite Rims, an off-
shoot of the legendary B-movie company American In-
ternational Pictures. Favorite Films took AlP movies
around the country regionally, which is how B-movie
prints travelled in those days, “bicycled" from one state
to the next through a network of sub-distributors. When
Jacobs was ready to start opening exploitation films na-
tionwide on his own. Crown was bom.

At first, he bought up foreign and domestic films that
couldn’t get a deal anywhere else. The first Crown re-

leases were 1 961 ’s Bloodlust! (which was eventually put
on a double bill with Blood Mania in the 70s). The Devil’s
Hand(^ 962), Terrified (1 963) and Varan the Unbelievable
(1962). Jacobs also took on The Madmen of Mandoras
in 1963, which was notoriously retitled They Saved
Hitler's Brain when it was sold to television in 1 976.

“A title is the handle,” Jacobs explained in an interview
with the Los Angeles Timesin 1 963. "You can’t lift a pic-
ture very high if the handle is weak."

Crown started hitting its stride in the late ’60s, when
there were plenty of low-budget indie companies all
competing for teenagers' pocket money. Genre double

THEY CRAVED FLESH
A HUNGER!

bills were the staple of the drive-in and tried-and-true formulas made gobd business
sense, In 1969, for example, Crown had the double bill of Blood of Dracula's Castle
and Nightmare in IVax (both written by Rex Carlton, who also gave us The Brain
That Wouldn't Die). Dracula’s Castle was a contemporary take on the popular
Gothic-flavoured Hammer films, while Nightmare was essentially a modernized
retelling of 1953's /fouse of

The Crown version of the latter film sees Cameron Mitchell as a mad sculptor
seeking revenge against his enemies by injecting them with a serum that causes
paralysis, and then putting them on display in a wax museum. (Mitchell's character
even sports an eye patch, which was surely a nod to House ofWa>ts one-eyed di-
rector Andre De Toth.) In addition to B-movie regulars Scott Brady and John "Bud"
Cardos (who went on to direct 1 977’s Kingdom of the Spiderdi, Victoria Carroll also
had a memorable role as a ditzy blond go-go dancer who becomes a statue in the
museum. She recalls her death scene: “(Mitchell] did a five-minule monologue, and
there I was, trying not to blink! My favourite review when the film came out was,
'Victoria Carroll does her best acting as a corpse!’"

Carroll would go on to a prolific
career in television, appearing in
prime-time series such as Hogan's
Heroes and The Incredible Hulk, and
later doing voice acting for Saturday
morning cartoons, including
Scooby-Doo and Darkwing Duck.

Crown films typically featured talent
on both the upsides and downsides
of their career trajectories. For ex-
ample, Blood of Dracula's Castle
features both a late-career John
Carradine as George the Butler and,
behind the camera, an early career
credit for legendary cinematogra-
pher Liszlo Kovacs (billed in the
credits as Leslie Kovacs). who would
later shoot Easy Rider. Five Easy
Pieces and Ghostbusters. The film
was directed by the late Al Adamson
[Satan's Sadists and Dracula vs,

Frankenstein) and also stars Alex
D’Arcy as the Count. Paula Raymond
as his bride, Adamson regular Jen- ^

nifer Bishop and Bud Cardos returning again for a brief role.

Dracula's Castle cost approximately $60,000 - around the
average budget for the director’s projects throughout his ca-
reer - and the shoot was roughly three to four days without
any reshoots. (“Al was very good at sticking to the budget,”
says Bishop, with a laugh. “He knew where to cut corners
and get the job done, but that’s what he was famous for”)

The film would also prove to be a launching pad for Adam-
son and his producing partner Sam Sherman, as later that
year they founded their own distribution outfit. Independent
International Pictures. The company’s first release, Satan's
Sadists, was timed to the biker trend, but Crown had already
jumped on the fad a couple of years earlier with The Wild
Rebels- pushed into theatres in 1 967 so it would be the sec-
ond biker movie to hit the market after Roger Corman’s very
successful The Wild Angels.

Wild Rebels director William Grefe (Impulse, Mako: The
Jaws of Death) started working with Crown because he knew
the company followed the popular trends. "I had written a
script in 1 966 about a stock car racer and I raised the money
to shoot it,” he recalls. "While we were in pre-production, I
read in Variety that Roger Corman's The Wild Angels ms a
huge hit, and I said to myself, ‘This motorcycle thing is gonna
be the next big trend.’ If you’re the second or third guy on the
bandwagon when a trend comes along, you can make a lot
of money, so I made a movie about a motorcycle gang instead
of a stock car racer."

Crown was competing with AlP even though they were also
a sub-distributor for the famed B-movie company, but it

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Barely Hold A Candle; John Carradine as
George the Butorin Blood of Dracula's Castle.

FROZEN INTO ZOMBIES..

DOOMED TO
UNBEARABU HORRORSI

wouldn’t be long before Crown would be forced to stake its own claim in the drive-in world,

“Most independent companies like AlP didn’t have the money to distribute their own pictures at a national
level because that meant they would have to set up offices all across the United States,’’ Grefe points out.
“So they'd go through what were known as sub-distributors that would handle the disfribution for them in
different territories."

AlP had become so successful that co-founder and president Samuel Z. Arkoff wanted to expand the com-
pany’s operations. "Sam was a real smart business guy who thought, ‘Why should we be paying commissions
to Crown in these thirteen western states, when we can just go ahead and form our own distribution unit?'”
says Grefe. “So Crown lost that big contract with AlP.”

With Crown now on its own, the company worked harder than ever to keep up with the drive-in trends of
its rivals, and horror would play an increasingly vital role. The company’s biggest success came in 1972 with
its in-house production Stanley, a nature-run-amok horror film that was basically Willardwith snakes instead

of rats. Again, Grefe came up with the idea
while looking through Variety, reading that
Willard\Nas the highest grossing independent
horror film of its time.

"I went to bed that night thinking animal
movies were maybe the next big trend," he
remembers. "And I literally dreamed Stanley
from beginning to end.”

Grefe pitched it to Jacobs, who he de-
scribes as “a crusty old distributor who always
had a cigar about a foot long sticking out of
his mouth,” and Mark Tenser (Crown’s vice
president and Jacobs’ son-in-law). The men
agreed to make the film for $125,000, with
Grefe directing it. in true exploitation fashion,

Jacobs quickly set up a release date for April 1 5, even though, at the time (November
1 ), Grefe didn’t even have a script. So he got together on a Friday with his writer friend
Gary Crutcher and wrote out every scene on a legal pad. Grefe then handed the pages
to Crutcher and said, “I gotta have a screenplay of this in Miami by Tuesday morningl”
Crutcher stayed up for 48 hours writing the script, sent it by FedEx that Monday, and
Grefe got it in Miami the next day. Stanleybegan principal photography on December
1 , wrapped right before Christmas, and the film was indeed in theatres by its sched-
uled release date. This was typical of the pace set by B-movie moguls of the era.

Despite the lightning turnaround, the movie was a hit. Grefe recalls, “It opened
against The Godfather, which made $1 81 .000 in LA- and Sfan/ey made $1 75,000!"

Other Crown horror hits of this period include the aforementioned Blood Mania
(1970) and PointofTerror(W3), both of which starred Peter Carpenter and went on
to become drive-in and late-night TV perennials. While Blood Mania is pretty dreadful
(when asked to comment on it, director Robert Vincent O’Neill simply said, “That was
a mistake.”), Point of Terror is
schlocky fun.

Before gaining infamy for playing
the titular role in lisa, She-Wolfofthe
S.S., Dyanne Thorne played a murder-
ous black widow in the film, which is
cenfred around a nightclub singer who
has homicidal nightmares that turn
out to be true, pome says she had a
blast making the movie, noting, “I got
to keep my heritage of killing some-
body in every film I ever get to do!”)

Another key Crown horror release
from this period, which became a late-
night TV favourite, was 1 974's Horror
High. Written by J.D. Feigelson (Dark
Night of the Scarecrow), it’s a teenage
Jekyll and Hyde story that follows a
nerdy science whiz named Vernon
Potts (Pat Card!) who invents a formula
that turns him into a monster who, in
his altered state, takes violent revenge
on the jocks and teachers that bully

Cowboys football team, which is
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land and Calvin Hill. “Mean Joe" Greene of the
Pittsburgh Steelers also appears.

Looking back at his experiences with
Crown, Cardi has mixed feelings. “I think they
did a good job of getting it out there,” he says,
although he clearly didn’t see much money
from die company. Horror Highms later reti-
tled Twisted Braintof television, and a sequel.
Return to Horror High, was made in 1987. He
adds. “I wasn’t sure if they were trying differ-
ent names, or If they were trying to keep us
from knowing where it was playing! The
- — - eoio. — money thing sucks, but the fact is they got a

lot of exposure for the film. I have kind of a
minor fan base because of it - apparently it

struck a chord with people."

Shortly after Horror High, Crown made its lone foray into blaxploitation witii 1 975's
Welcome Home, Brother Charles, which added a bizarre body horror twist to the re-
venge tale. An audacious UCLA film school project by a then 33-year-old undergrad-
uate named Jamaa Fanaka (Penitentiary), this treatise on African-American male
sexuality dispensed with the post-S/7aff “superspade" cliches and focused instead
on an average Joe named Charles Murray (Mario Monte), who’s nearly castrated by
a racist cop during a marijuana bust and ends up railroaded into prison by a corrupt
judge. After being subjected to a series of horrible experiments, Charles is released
three years later with newly discovered “abilities” and proceeds to take murderous
revenge on those who put him behind bars. However, he doesn’t use a gun or a knife
but his own “shaft,” which holds hypnotic power over women and can extend over
ten feet to strangle his enemies!

The ’70s also saw more killer animal films in the wake of Jaws and sasquatch
movies fuelled by the decade’s Bigfoot craze. The Legend of Boggy Creekms a mas-
sive low-budget hit on the drive-in circuit, so it's no surprise that Crown would have
its own hairy beast flick... well, almost.

When writer/director William Stromberg took his script for The Crater Lake Monster
to Crown, the company wasn’t interested in a sasquatch story, and asked if he could
come up with something else. So the filmmaker went home, and changed the monster
into a dinosaur. The result, released in 1 977, is essentially a showcase for the stop-
motion animation talents of the late Dave Allen (Honey. I Shrunk the Kids, 0), Jim
Danforth {When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, The NeverEndlng Story and Phil Tippett
(Star Wars, Starship Trooperd).

"I thought they did a fine job,” says Stromberg. "I had no problem with how the ef-
fects looked, there just weren’t enough of Uiem. I . ,
had planned for several more animation
sequences, but Crown vetoed doing
any more. 1 guess they just fig-
ured, 'We don’t want it good,
we want it Friday."'

According to Variety, The
Crater Lake Monster m6e over
a million dollars, yet Stromberg says he never saw any
of it. “I went to several Hollywood attorneys trying to
track down the money, and one lawyer told me,

'How much justice can you afford? They

probably going to cost you as much
money as they owe you to fight ’em.’”

As far as Crown's business practices
go, opinions are mixed. While Cardi and
Stromberg weren't happy with the com-
pany, Grefe asserts, “Red Jacobs was a .
tough old guy, but he was the type of guy
who shook your hand and it was as good
as any contract."

John H. Burrows, a producer for Crown
during the early ’70s, remembers Jacobs
as a fair but by-the-books businessman.
“If you made a picture and went to Crown
for distribution, the deals were very tough.
Red's contracts were ironclad. Some of
the producers, after they saw their first
cheques, would go back to him and say,
'Is this all we’re getting?' Red would say,
‘Of course! You read the contract. We're
doing all the work. We’re out there push-
ing your picture.’"

And Crown certainly pushed some
strange pictures, including one of the
kookiest horror films in its canon: Drac-
ula 's Dog (1 978}. Directed by Albert Band
(/ Btiry the Living}, and starring Michael
Pataki (Grave of the Vampire). Jose Ferrer
[Blood Tide) and Reggie Nalder (Salem's
Loti, the canine in question is a Doberman
with long fangs, designed by Stan Winston
in one of his first makeup gigs.

Business was booming, and Crown
dabbled in a variety of niches. For exam-
ple, the boogie van craze led to the com-
pany releasing teen comedy The Van
(1977), featuring a kid trying to get lucky
and make money racing his customized
Dodge. Raunchy T&A comedies were also
in, and the company put out a number of
classics in the horny teen category, includ-
ing Weekend with the Babysitter (1970),
The Pom Pom Girls (1 976) and arguably
the best of the lot, Van Nuys Blvd. (1 979),
which were surprisingly much less
raunchy than the competition.

"Mark Tenser didn’t like dirty, smutty
movies.” explains David Baughn, the for-
mer executive vice-president of distribu-
tion at Crown. "He liked a very clean
image, and light T&A comedy.”

However, the Crown formula took a
sleazier, darker turn as the decade drew
to a close, with 1 979’s Malibu High, about
a troubled high school girl who first be-

BEFORE HIS DEATH LAST YEAR, LEGENDARY
PRODUCER TALKED TO RUE

MORGUE ABOUT THE UNFORGETTABLE NIGHT
PREMIERED AT THE DRIVE-IN

ERIC S. EICHELBERGER

wrote Kevin Thomas for the Los Angeles Times. However, this “amateur"
film, made for $24,500, grossed over four million dollars and was the highest earning drive-in picture
of 1 964. It remains one of the top cult movies of all time.

On Valentine’s Day of last year, we lost one of the driving forces behind it, producer
' David Friedman, He was an exploitation pioneer known as “King of the Trash Film,” who,

' along with Herschell Gordon Lewis, invented the gore film. Raised in the carnival business,

Friedman brought that P.T. Barnum school of showmanship to his movie campaigns, with
' taglines such as "Nothing so appalling in the.annals of horror!” and “Gruesomely stained
in blood color.” A wordsmith and master promoter, he gave up a prominent position at
Paramount to take on a life producing and distributing exploitation films.

) Conducting interviews for my 201 3 documentary. Exploit ThisI: The Complete History
t, of Exploitation Cinema'in America, atew summers ago, I had the honour of visiting Fried-
man in his home in Anniston, Alabama, where I was greeted in a den of old carnival relics,
circus posters and memorabilia, and exploitation posters from the early days.

Surrounded by this ephemera, he told me the following story of the night Blood Feast
[ opened at the drive-in. Here it is, in his own words...

Sten Kohiberg owned the drive-in. So we'd fin-
ished hie movie - as you know, Bob Sinise cut the
picture, the father of actor Gary Sinise. ... Bob called me
and said he’d just seen this scene where Fuad Ramses
pulls the tongue out of the girl’s mouth. He says. “Where
are you going to play this?" And 1 said, “Bob, don't worry
about where I’m going to play It. You just cut it And by the
way, we don't want it good, we want it Thursday, so get
: towork!"

So, the picture’s finished and nobody's
seen it. Herschell says, “You want to screen
it?” “Yeah." So, I said to my [wife] Carol,

“You wanna see ttiis thing?” She said, “Not
really, but i’ll go witii you." So it was us,

Herschell, Kohiberg of course, and one
other guy that was asleep or drunk or
something in the screening room. On
^ the drive home to our apartment ! said.

“Well, what d’ya think of it?" And she
says, “In one word: vomitous.” So the next
day, I ordered half-a-million vomit bags
and sent them out to every theatre that it
was gonna play.

Now the picture’s finished, Kohiberg says. “Where do
you wanna play? Do you wanna open here in Chicago?” I
said, “No way. no way!" 1 said, “tf it dies in Chicago, every-
body in the world will know about it” He says, “So, what
about Gary?” - he had a drive-in in Gary, Indiana. “No,
ttiat’s too close to Chicago." He said, "Ofi, wait^ minute.
Let's go down and open it in Peoria.” I said, “Okay. That’s

fine. If it doesn’t work
there, nobody will know the difference."

Kohiberg was a showman and he had a pretty good
manager down there. He put up tiie one-sheet and .gave
out the barf bags and everything else. [On the night of the
premiere], we get about five miles out from the theatre
and suddenly there’s a funeral [procession] ... Inching
along, in the distance I can see the top of the screen tower
of the Bel-Air Drive-in. I said, “Herschell,
they’re going to see Blood FeasR"

We get up there and there’s an Illinois state
trooper turning people away: “Full up! Full
up!" And Herschell says. “Let me see you
square him up.” Well, i get out and i said, “Hey
.sergeant, I’m the producer and this is the di-
Tector of ttie picture and we’d like-" “I ougfiTS
run you guys in! You’ve got my whole section
clogged up! Well, pet on in there, if you can
find any room.”

I think we parked at the projection booth.
The picture unreels and I’m standing ttiere and
some good ol' boy, in overalls and a white shirt,
he’s watching this scene where Fuad Ramses is skinning
the girl. He says, "They sure do make it look real, don’t
they?” I said, “I heard those people ih Hollywood really did
that to those girls!" He said, “No shit!" That was so funny!

Ott the way home. Carol says, “Al! the places are
closed. I'm starving! ” But after that one night, that one
screening in that one theatre, I knew my wife would
never go hungry.^ * ♦ *

27 )

^ coKJt^trs

' WO^D

CORMAN'S^WORLD;-

EXPLOITS MA'JIOLLYWOOB REBEL

Starring RoQfer Corman, Jack Nicholson atM davId Carradine
Written by Gregory Locklear and Alex Stapleton „ ‘

Directed by Alex Stapleton

Anchor Bay .

Roger Corman is responsible for launching some of the most important
careers in tfie film business, and it would be impossible to envision the
shape of Hollywood without his involvement over the last 58 years. So if
you’re planning to-put together the definitive portrait of his careet, you’ll
have to dig up a helluva lot of legends and A-listers for interviews. The task
is seemingly insurmountable but to her credit, first-time director Alex Sta-

piCLUII ^UIICU HUM UUdUlllUliy.

After five years of unremitting tenacity, she wrangled together a veritable
all-you-can-eat buffet of iconic film heroes induding Jonatoan Demme,

• Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, William Shatner and the late David Car-
, .^.radine iri what was possibly his final on-camera interview just weeks be-
fore he died. §ijt It’s rare bird Jack Nicholson who steals the show with an
amazingly Cdndid, often hilarious and at limes very emotional interview.

Most 'of the critical epochs of Gorman’s legacy are touched upon here,
froriT his early teen angst movies, to his biker films, creature features,

• women-in-prison flicks, to his audacity in importing foreign art house films
from* the likes of l^llinrand Bergman and putting them on American drive-
in screens.

Unfortunately, little attention Is paid to fiis iconic cyde of Poe adaptations
starring Vincent Price, though some of his lesser-known legacies are given
their due, including his racially explosive, far-ahead-of-its-time segregation
drama The Intruder {^%2) which, according to brother -

Gene, is the only movie Corman made that ever lost money.

The doc omits Gorman’s most recent cycle of creature
features such as Sharktopus, Instead ending with one of his
career high points, the acceptance of his honorary Academy
Award for lifetime achievement at a private ceremony
where the filmmaker is inundated with words of liaise by
proteges and peers alike. Quentin Tarantino perhaps best
sums up the mood of the room when he says, “The Acad-
emy thanks you. Hollywood thanks you. Independent film-
making thanks you. But most importantly, for all the wild, Wi*"
weird, cool, crazy moments you have put on the drive-in I
screens, the movie lovere of the
planet Earth ttiank
.you!"

The DVD and

Blu-ray extras are rather
- slight, featuring just a few ex-
tended interviews and a
handful of on-camera trib-
utes to Corman by many of
the interviewees, butthe fea-
ture Itself is definitely required
viewing, and Is pure gold for movie
fans from start to finish.

[For more on Gorman's World, listen to
Stuart's podcast in^rview with Staple-
ton at rue-morgue, com. - Ed.]

comes a blackmailing hooker, then moves up to being a hit woman. This led into the '80s,
when slasher films started booming, thanks to Halloween and Friday die 13th, and Crown
had its own entry with Don't Answer the Phonel {1 980). Perhaps the title was a take-off on
1 979's When a Stranger Calls, because Don't Answer the Phone! is a typical greasy psycho
stalk-'n'-kill story, but there's not that much phone-stalking in the movie. Crown also re-
leased The Hearse that year, featuring a deadly death cab and a co-starring role for former
Hollywood great Joseph Gotten (Citizen Kane, Shadow of a Doubt, Soylent Greert).

In November of 1 980, Crown would lose its founder when Jacobs died at the age of 78.
Tenser had been the president of Crown since 1 973, when Jacobs stepped into the role of
chairman, but the two men had long been the figureheads of the com^^
pany. At the same time. Crown was starting to face new business chal-
lenges. Companies such as AlP were being bought out or went out of
business in the early '80s, and drive-ins were being bulldozed by real es-
tate developers. When Baughn joined the company in 1 984, it was doing
wide releases, instead of taking the films around regionally. "By this point,
they were spending money on national breaks, full TV and newspaper ad-
vertising," he says.

Lucidly, a booming home video market was able to compensate for
some of the drive-in losses. Baughn recalls, "When the VHS business was
taking off, all the VHS buyers were looking for movies that played 25 mar-
kets in a TV orbit. Even if it was a crummy little film, and we had our
crummy little films that were made for very little money, we would make
a million dollars on aVHS sale. People thought a movie that played in 25
markets was wortii paying for because they were in a boom market
where people were grabbing VHS like crazy.’'

While some B-companies. including AlP. faltered because they tried to
compete with the majors, Crown ultimately died off because it didn’t want to grow bigger.
Baughn remembers that the comply had the opportunity to buy the Coen Brothers' first
film. Blood Simple, but turned it down.

"The only thing we had to do was come up with an advance of $1 50,000. [Tenser] pretty
much had a T&A drive-in mentality, and his attitude was that he wasn’t going to pay for
anything that wasn’t something he made, and he never wanted other investors involved.
Mark was at the age where I think he felt he already made a pile of money, and I don’t think
he wanted to gamble, He just couldn't grow, and I think in his own heart he felt smart about
that.”

By this point, the writing had been on the wall for a while. Among the last horror pictures
that the company distributed were the occult sacrifice pic Prime fv//(1989), horror-comedy
My Mom's a Werewolf i^9BQ) and the mind control-themed Brain rLV/sters{1991). By the
’90s, the newer wave of independents such as Miramax were under major studio umbrellas
and had greater resources to compete with the majors than the original indies.

"The majors didn’t want us around.” laments Baughn, "They were pushing up the price
of prints and advertising at a rapid pace, and we were being squeezed out."

Though Crown has been dormant as a theatrical distributor for a long time, the company
still has an office on Wilshtre Boulevard in Los Angeles, with the Tensers still in charge after
all these years. They're not making movies anymore, but they’re still sitting on a large body
of work, which they continue to license (a complete list of their titles can be found on the
company's official website crownintlpictures.com). The gems of Crown’s catalog live on -
a reminder of the glory days of B-movie making. ^

3 28

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N “8HDULDI86ERS;’ THE QPENiNS TRACK OF MINISTRY’S TWELFTH STUDIO ALBUM, REUPSE, AL JQUR6ENSEN DECLARES, "I’M NOT DEAD YET!”

The song is aimed squarely at the breed of music industry suits
that inspired him to establish his own 13th Planet label in 2004
with his wife Angelina, but it also serves as a reminder - if you
needed one- that Jourgensen is a survivor. »-

No, really. Not just in the sense that he’s pre- || 1, I
vailed in the face of heroin-addled adversity ||flH|||m|
he’s forged a 30-year career in the fickle entertainment
f^%-ene of the leading purveyors of industrial music, but be- I j Ojk

..‘tfauw:he's technically died ttreeftmes. And he's sung about it. ^
an overdriven effects unit set to a nightmare-scape of
' i^il^slGn-gulded drum detonations, corrosive guitar riffage, hor-

^hd^ samples, and scathing critiques of the American gov- 35, w.ipwf

^ Lately tITbugh, despite being clean for a number of years '

^vy^l. sort of. . . read on), the residual effects of Jourgensen’s
fegefidary hard livin' have led to health scares. Maybe that’s
yit^.Relapse (out now from AFM/1 3th Planet) finds him in a contemplative mood,
enough in his own skin to experiment musically, and lyrically ad-
'5 he’sconquered and the ones he deems necessary to his con-

the last Ministry record, the best Ministry record, and one of the 50 best albums of
all time. While we can’t attest to it being the group’s finest hour necessarily, it's def-
initely a fierce yet decidedly looser musical outing - one that even finds Jourgensen
— „ quesfioning the effectiveness of the politically charged preaching

, J he often does from his musical pulpit, without relinquishing his
right to scream from it.

n The musician’s most recent brush with death also inspired

V T ^ release of his long-promised “country core" side-project.

Buck Satan and the 666 Shooters’ Bikers Welcome! Ladies
Drink Free - a twangier, lighter-hearted album that eschews
a Ministry’s exacting aggro assault for simpler, tongue-in-cheek

A# tt tunes about drinking, fighting and women.

V And then there's FIX: The Ministry Movie (on OVD April 1 0
from Blairwood Entertainment), a documentary that takes such

' unflinching look at what transpired onstage and, mostshock-

jpgjy backstage during Ministry’s 1996 Sphinctour (Jourgensen
shoots hard drugs on camera for starters) that some legal issues needed to be ironed
out between the filmmakers and Jourgensen's camp before it could be released.

But maybe we ought to turn the mic over to Uncle Al. Hell, he’s come and gone

i: Al Jourgensen and
Victor, on stage during

You ’ve said that this is the last Ministry alburn because
of the intensity the band requires. Why does it have to
be so intense?

1 think it’s the fact that i get kind of anal retentive about
Ministry as opposed to my side projects, The side projects
I just iet fly; we get drunk and we jam and we put out
records. But Minisfry takes so much thought on making
it right, it’s almost like having a job.

What makes a song a Ministry song?

It’s got to be either sonically challenging or lyrically chal-
lenging. That’s the only two criteria that I have. Just to
make sure that the stuff pushes the boundary a little bit.
Whereas the other stuff, you know, I don’t care, It’s just
me and a bunch of friends jam-
ming in a studio that I own so it’s
not like we have to meet deadlines.

Ministry, it gets a little bit different.

Mikey [Scaccia], my guitar player,
talked me into doing this record.

We were doing the Buck Satan
record after I got out of the hospital
and we just started jamming on
some metal stuff in between coun-
try songs. At the end of the Buck
Satan record, Mikey’s like, “We
need to release this, this is too
good." I was against it at first because we only had six
[songs], which meant we’d have to do another five or six.
But he finally talked me into it because my health's hold-
ing out and everything’s been good for at least the last
year-and-a-half. No more blood pouring out of my nose
and mouth and ass. So I decided, well, what the fuck?

They let my wife Angie into the emergency room after
ttiey had defibrillated me, and I just remember looking at
her and saying, “Third time’s a charm, baby. 1 think I'm
going." At least virtien I was hovering above my own body
the first two times, I knew that it was time to get back.
This time, it was like a dead phone call, like an unplugged
phone. ... But I’ve been puking up blood for about eight
years now on the road. That’s why I wanted to call it quits.

I just finally got sick of it, man. I was not healthy and I
couldn’t figure out why. 1 thought puking up blood was
part of just being on a rock tour. So I never complained,

I just did my puking. And then after a tour, it would usually
get better after a couple of weeks but after The Last
Suckeriow, it didn’t get better. I went into seizures and I
bled out. it was definitely time. But the
paramedics and the doctors fixed me
up and now I’m back.

Are you scared of death?

No! I’ve died three times, and twice I’ve left my body. The
last time was the first time I didn’t leave my body, which
is what kind of freaked me out and got me into gear
about getting unfinished business done.

Wait, wouldn’t not leaving your body be
a good thing?

Is it the unfinished business that
keeps bringing you back or some-
thing else?

I don’t know. It’s made me spiritual.
1 do think that there's a supreme
being that has a master plan, I ac-
tually do. I’m not affiliated with any
religion but I do feel like there’s pur-
poses in life and that there’s fate,
positive energy, negative energy, dark matter, light
matter... there’s all sorts of contrasts in the universe.
I just know that the last time [1 died] really freaked me
out. The first time, I didn't even get defibrillated. I got
mouth-to-mouth by my friend Phildo [Phil Owens]
from the Skatenigs, and I was hovering above my body
watching and 1 thought, “This is wrong, man. This is
like man-on-man sex. This is weirding me out.” I
mean, it’s fine for other people but, for me, I was
freaked out. So I went back into my body, woke up,
punched him in the face and called him
a rapist. [Laughs] I

thought he was just fiddling about with me while I vvas .
passed out.

With this being the last Ministry album and Buck Satan
being more of a fun project, where will you funnel your
darkness?

Uh, probably at home. [Laughs] Probably my wife will see
me brooding around, yelling at CNN and MSNBC ’cause
I won’t even watch Fox. I mean, I'll throw something at
the TV.

Da you even need that kind of outlet anymore?

No, because I’ve got enough personal life experience now
where I don’t need a muse like George W. Bush. I needed ,
that at that time. I didn’t know where to go. After [bassist
Paul] Barker left the band and I did Houses of die Mol^i
[2004], I found my muse. I found something ttiat 1
really pissed about. But nowadays, this new record is haif^”*
political and half personal. Buck Satan really helped me'’.<^^
with the personal part, to be able to sing about my own
personal life experiences.

Was Ministry’s move from a colder industrial sound to
harder thrash metal tied to Barker's departure?

I think that’s part of it. Rrst of all, the guy couldn’t play a
fast bass riff to save his life. I’m working with all these
otiier people who are total thrash-heads [now]. Even on
"Thieves,” I replaced his bass ’cause he couldn’t play it.
We definitely sped up the tempo when I got back with
Mikey. [guiterist] Tommy Victor, (bassist] Tony Campos,
and [bassist] Casey Orr.

Some of your fans would love for you to return to the ^ ,
sound oflhe Land of Rape arrd Honey andlhe Mind is'^Vv,;.^^
a Terrible Taste albums. Would you?. u -V::

vans

Btopp

i ■•C'.'TttS:

^ ^ From The other Side

’* V ^ (left) guitarist Torpmy

X . 1 Ministfy's2008C-U-L

, aIN,': _ —

y* ■

As a matter of fact, we did on the end
of this new album. We have this
trance thing going on. We’ll dabble in
that but I don’t really care what my
fucking fans think. I know my fans
and I don’t trust 'em. [Laughs]

You also recently said that you have
“a lot of fans and a lot of psychos
ready to pounce.”

During the Psalm 69 tour I had a
stalker that threatened to kill me
every night so I had to go up onstage
in a bulletproof vest and that kinda
j. sucked. I finally just got tired of wear-
^ ing it because I would sweat right
through it, it was so heavy and bulky.
I finally took it off and bought a T-shirt
to wear - actually at Target in Dallas,
~ Texas - which had a target on its
chest. If you’re going to do it, get it
over with tonight because I’m sick of
this. For twelve states I had to check
in undertake names, stay at a differ-
ent hotel than the band. ... It was
pretty creepy, man.

The full title of 1992’s Psalm 69: The
Way to Succeed and the Way to Suck
Eggs is a direct reference to Aleister
Crowley. What’s your
I've read all of his books. I’ve
of [Aldous] Huxley’s books. I’ve read
all of Timothy Leary’s books. I’ve read
all of [William S.] Burroughs’ books.
I've read all of [Charles] Bukowski’s
books. I kind of have a fascination
with authors. I lived with Leary for
years. I’ve worked with Bur-
•-.f’^oughs. I’ve met Bukowski. I met

r [Allen] Ginsberg before he died. It’s
kind of like the grass Is greener on
the other side. I understand how to do
my stuff so I’m bored with it. I’m not
a big music fan, per se, but I’m a big
i^oupie of authors. I don’t understand
how they put together a book. I’m still
trying to figure it out, which
|irobabiy sets me apart from
(host metal guys, who don't even
4 W 10 W how to read.

I^ yaur interest in the occult just
for art and fun or is there a more
serious side to it?

Nah, there's no serious side to it.
Yeah, I read about it but I don't
go out and slaughter goats and
babies on my front lawn or any-
thing.

^ij ^ l^a past, you've sampled snip-
■ pets pj dialogue from horror
Jiliik, koluding HeWmzer, Day of the
Dead. The Devils, Aliens, Suspiria -
2 Te you a big horror fan?

Mikey's more the horror movie afi-
^ cfbnado but yeah, of course, over the
rars. I i^en did a soundtrack for a
wie edited Wicked Lake that was

vm iflv

inCQ iflV
RHD

SdARdED SHDDdinG
UP LIKE R rflRRiRC.

about lesbian vampires. ... It's funny because I get all these calls from horror movie di-
rectors and producers and video game companies wanting my music for games that
are really violent, and I’ve never played a video game in
my life. I don’t go to the theatres to see horror movies.
You know, I don't wait for the release of Underworld 7
or whatever it is now. But I’m affiliated through proxy
just because my music Is kind of violent and seems to
fit within the constraints of the genre.

Your vocals do often sound like someone communicating
from the other side.

Well, I've been to the other side so that’s where that
comes from.

Speaking of movies. I assume you've seen FIX ?

Yeah, I saw it a couple times. I'm not really into It but I
guess [the producers] are working things out with the
contract so I can get paid and they can release the
movie, and good luck to 'em. I never want to watch it again. I've been clean for ten years
now so it’s pretty weird for me to [watch myself] shooting up through a whole movie.
It’s like, god, really? It's kind of sad. it’s like watching a slow train wreck.

To what do you attribute your ability to thrive in that chaotic, self-abusive lifestyle?

I had to escape. I hated it. We got so big so fast after “Jesus Built My Hotrod.” I mean,

if.

came out, I had five handlers and
everyone watching my every move.
And so I rebelled. I went into my own
little cocoon, into my own head, and
started shooting up like a maniac by
that point, it's just really oppressive,
dude. You have to know what it's like
to have people sniffing up your ass
every damn second of the day.
There's somebody that’s with you
and you just want to escape. So, I es-
caped through drugs.

But you’re doing better now and
you're sober again. I congratulate you
for tha-

Woah, wait, wait... you’re kind of
wrong there. I said I'm clean. I didn't
say I was sober. We were up all night
last night In the studio drinking red
wine and beer, and I'm literally shlt-
faced now as I speak to you. [Laughs]

You’re functioning very well.

Yeah, we get around...

What is it about Relapse that makes
it “the best Ministry album and one
of the 5D best records of all-time?”
Wow, that's a good question. Well, I
know this much: even after The Last
Sucker, which I really liked a lot, I
know I stopped listening to It after
about a week. After I’m done, I never
want to hear this shit again. And now
it's going on about a month of listen-
ing to Buck Satan and [Relapse] and
I’m still not sick of them.

But all that material is still a big pari
of your legacy.

That's great. I’m happy for It. But I
haven’t listened to “Every Day is Hal-
loween” for years.

Do you still feel like you're trying to
break new ground musically?

No, I don’t feel I have to. I feel I do ac-
cidentally sometimes because we go
in with a blank canvas when we start
a new record. I don’t have a pro-
jected game plan for it or anything.
That’s why this new Ministry record
is so diverse. I don't feel the need to
prove anything to anyone.

You’ve experimented with many gen-
res in the past through your various
side projects. Are there any other mu-
sical experiments you’d like to try?
Yeah, we’re doing a blues album...
serious blues, like Albert King-type
stuff. Distorted blues. It’ll probably be
hated but then probably liked in five
years. [Laughs] And me and MIkey
want to do one more Buck Satan
record because I’ve already got
seven songs written for it - music,
lyrics, everything. So I think I’ve got

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27-29

(OHKSI ANM ISQ-n I UOHAIKM I GAXING I HOBRM IlMO Q'Oiure

BRUGUES EXPLAINS HGM ART

k CUBA'S FIRST ZOMBIE MOVIE

D RECTOR

PLura

("’HILE ITS TltlE Is AN OBVIOUS NOD TO SHAUN OF THE DEAD,
WHICH IS ITSELF AN HOMAGE TO GEORGE A. ROMERO’S
DAWN OF THE Df/TO; director Alejandro Brogues sasrsdtirblggest
influence on his much-anticipated Cuban zom-com Juan of the Dead
(which was recently picked up by Outsider Pictures and will begin a
limited theatrical run this month) was in fact the adventurous life of his older brother
Juan. In fact, Juan Brugufc, now a Miami resident, rettirned to Havana for the first time
in a decade during the film’s eight-week shoot In late 2010 to visit his little brother's
film set.

“He was hanging around, saying he was the
real Juan.” Brugues says with a laugh.

Rue Morgue spoke to the filmmaker last Sep-
tember during the Toronto Intematlonal Film Fes-
tival, where Juan of the Dead had its world
premiere. It stars the lanky Alexis Diaz de Ville-
gas as Juan, a caretree Havana fisherman whose
lazy file is jeopardized
when the dead rise. To-
gether with his best friend
Lazaro (Jorge Molina).

Juan, in the tradition of his
countrymen, makes the
best of a bad situation and
creates a business out of
disposing of his neigh-
bours' zombie problems.

Limited access to for-
eign horror films means
most Cubans are unfamil-
iar with modern-day
movie zombies. This gives
rise to much of Juan's
comedy, including one
scene where our hero and his neighbours won-
der if an infected resident is a vampire or a
werewolf, eventually bashing the unfortunate
flesh-eater in the head with a cross to kill it.

Soon enough, though, the Cuban government

has identified the problem: the zombies are in
fact “dissidents” In the employ of the American
government.

“We Cubans don’t know much about zom-
bies,” affirms BruguOs, "and I mixed It with the
fact that television blames everything on the
United States.”

While it is tempting to interpret
Juan as political allegory, Brugues In-
sists that he is primarily interested in
using the zombie film to comment on
the challenges of everyday Cuban
life.

“So I get to do a zombie film, which
is an idea that I really love, and I get
to talk about stuff that bothers me
or that interests me.”

Indeed, the harsh realities of
day-to-day existence in his home-
land inform much of Juan of the
Dead. For instance, neighbours '
bitten by zombies are
treated with expired
drugs; Juan and his J
companions try to make their getaway^,
from the encroaching undead In an old_

Fishing With JuanrAiexis Diaz de Villegas
as Juan adrift on his raft, and {top} on a
pile ot zombie casualties.

Lada, a notoriously unreliable Russian car; and
Havana residents flee their overrun city for the
shores of Miami on improvised boats and rafts,
an illegal emigration strategy that real Cubans
employ all the time.

“I had to leave so much outside of that be-
cause the Cuban reality is so rich.” Bmgues
says. “Somany weird things happen that I would
probably need tvvo dr three films to get it alt in.”

Given all the deprivations the country’s people
have endured since Fidel Castro took office in
1959 - especially In the wake of the ongoing
American trade embargo - one wonders if
Cubans would react like Juan if faced with a real
zombie apocalypse.

"Things happen to us and we keep living like
nothing happened,” says BruguOs of his fellow
citizens. “It's just something that adds to our
daily lives. So I thought, ‘If this happens, what
would we do?’ So [my goal was] to show how
we Cubans react to problems, but only the next
step was zombies. Putting zombies in there
. and just behaving like nothing was happen-
ing and going on with their lives trying
business, which is what
Cubans do. When things get
tough, we all leave in the
raft!"

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THE HOUSE THAT JOSS BUILT
THE CABIN IN THE WOODS

Starring Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford
and Kristen Connolly
Directed by Drew Goddard
Written by Joss Whedon
and Drew Goddard
Alliance

“If you go down in tlie woods today,
you're sure of a big surprise,.."

I appropriated that famous line from
something much more benign, but it
perfectly sums up The Cabin in the
Woods - and the challenges of re-
viewing it

If you’re familiar with Joss Whe-
don’s oeuvre, you know that the
writer/director has carved a career out
of lovingly smashing genre expecta-
tions, in TV shows such as Buffy the
Vampire Slayer, A^gelan(\ FireUy.knb
that's exactly what this film does - in
spades. So don't let that mundane title
fool you: there’s a lot more going on
here than a group of stereotypical
teens getting sliced and diced after hunkering down for a
woodsy weekend of debauchery. Too bad that telling you
about it would ruin the thrill ride.

From the first twist, it's clear ttiat Whedon - who orig-
inally hatched the concept - and co-writer/director Drew

Goddard understandXhe genre, and that’s absolutely crit-
ical for what they do next; comment upon those who
make/consume it and then subvert that further with a
healthy infusion of sci-fi. But unlike other self-referential
films (e.g., Scream), Cabin does not beat audiences over
the head with its commentary. The storytelling remains
paramount.

What I can tell you about the plot; there’s nothing ran-
dom about those teens who vamoose to the titular cabin,
nor the vicious creatures that
begin to stalk them shortly
after they arrive. Because Whe-
don had a hand in this, it’s all
part of a bigger corporate con-
spiracy/ancient ritual - one
which the drugged and largely
oblivious youths must get to
the bottom of (literally!) before
their numbers dwindle to none.

Cabin earns its R rating, but
the gore and nudity {and even
the token pothead) are integral
to the narrative, rather than
simply being a ploy to get
asses into theatre seats. And
perhaps that's what makes it
so fantastic: this is a movie by
two people who honestly want
to tell a good, exciting horror story, and who are not sim-
ply using the genre as a means to an end.

The Cabin in the Woods comes stocked with some-
thing for every breed of horror fan - from monster lovers
to devotees of Whedon’s dark sense of humour. I'd con-

clude with; Wanted: More horror films like this. But Cabin
is truly one of a kind,

MONICAS. KUEBLER

nev§m§e’''''"

THE RAVEN

Starring John Cusack, Alice Eve and Luke Evans
Directed by James McTeigue
Written by Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare
Relativity Media

There are many reasons to be wary of a "high con-
cept" Poe film, but I was willing to sign on for a slick yet
stylish version that might offend lit purists while lever-
aging Poe’s themes in original ways and providing some
creepiness via the author himself.

This is not that film, however.

To be fair, The Raven doesn’t really want to be a horror
film, despite a couple of grisly, sub-Saw moments. In-
stead, it tries to make the most of Poe’s other legacy as
the inventor of the detective story, putting him at the
centre of a rather standard catch-the-killer-and-save-
the-girl plot. Sure, the frenetic goings-on are adorned
with quick quotes of Poe-inspired images, story ele-
ments and biographical data. . . but that’s exactly what
might put off the target audience - except perhaps for
those who believe Poe's work needs a dash of excite-
ment via a “pulse-pounding" soundtrack and a fetching ,
love interest (Alice Eve).

A square-jawed Baltimore police detective (Luke
Evans) recruits Poe (John Cusack) as a kind of expert
consultant when folks start getting dispatched in ways

that echo the author's stories. With his verbal dexterity
and skill playing unconventional romantic leads, Cusack
isn’t necessarily a bad choice to portray Poe, but the
script and direction conspire against whatever ambitions
he may have had to stretch himself as an actor. Rushing
headlong from one corpse to another, he rarely gets a
chance to show us the
character’s torment or
genius directly. Instead,
we’re constantly told
about these qualities by
others.

Worse, the script is
full of both grating
anachronisms (a “ser-
ial killer" headline
when that term wasn’t
coined until the 1 970s)
and cliche-heavy dia-
logue (“Edgar, we
can’t go on like this. .
"). And when the villain
is finally unmasked we couldn’t care less because he
has no meaningful connection to the main characters.
In short. I’d say that The Raven is enough to make Poe
turn over in his grave except I don’t want to give any-
one ideas for a sequei.

PETER GUTIERREZ

"Wke

UNDERWORLD: AWAKENING

Starring Kate Beckinsale, Stephen Rea and India Eisley
Directed by Mans Marlind and Bjdm Stein
Written by Len Wiseman, John Klavin, et al.

Sony

Fans of the Underworld
franchise were probably
pretty surprised that a fourth
installment was being re-
leased five years after the
last one. Then again, it does-
n't take a genius to realize
that squeezing Kate Beckin-
sale into a skintight latex
cat-suit equals big bucks at
the box office.

Set twelve years after the
events of Underworld: Evolu-
tion (2006), we discover that
mankind has learned of the
existence of vampires and werewolves and insti-
gated a systematic purge to wipe both species off
the planet. We join Selene (Beckinsale) as she
awakens from a lengthy coma in the experimental
labs of a pharmaceutical company run by Dr. Jacob
Lane (Stephen Rea: Feardotcom, V for Vendetta),
whose evil agenda to make the lycans invincible is
painstakingly revealed throughout the course of the
movie. Selene breaks out of the lab and discovers
a girl (India Eisley), who is apparently a rare vam-
pire-lycan hybrid, with whom Selene appears to
share a psychic bond.

Although it’s gorier than its predecessors. Awak-
ening is unfortunately not as dark, sexy or exciting
as the first three films due to a definite lack of sleek
edginess in the combat between the vamps and the
lycans. Selene does battle in a three-sided war:

with humans, who, for the most part, are completely
inept at fighting her; against vampires, who have
become a demoralized lot; and with C61 lycans, who
look about as scary as a pack of cranky Pomerani-
ans. She’s more lethal in this outing - one scene
sees her break back into the lab in Matrix-Wke fash-
ion, slashing throats and shredding ly-
cans with high-powered automatic
weapons - but when she’s not deci-
mating baddies she mostly stomps
through the film looking
like she’s on her way to a
goth club. It’s this abusive
overuse of style over sub-
stance, coupled with flat
performances and unin-
spiring dialogue that make
this a disappointing outing.

Although the movie has
been presented in theatres
as a 3-D experience, most
of the time you won't even
realize it until the odd
throwing star or werewolf
claw lunges out of the screen. Yep,
Beckinsale's marquee value is clearly all
that saved this sucker from going direct to video.

LAST CHANCE LANCE

COLD SWEAT

Starring Facundo Espinosa, Marina Giezer and Omar Musa

Directed by Adrian Garcia Bogliano

Written By Adrian Garcia Bogliano, Ramiro Garcia

Bogliano and Hernan Moyaiio

Dark Sky

For the thoughtful horror fan, the concept of evil
as it is represented in various foreign cultures is an
alluring one. A filmmaker’s interpretation of his own
region’s dark history can tell a story in ways that
most reference materials cannot, and while Adrian
Garcia Bogliano’s Cold Sweat does represent a very

rare product - an Argentinian horror film - the re-
sult is a bit of a mess.

Friends Roman (Facundo Espinosa) and Ali (Ma-
rina Giezer) sit nervously outside a large, creepy
building, wondering if they should enter in search
of Roman’s ex-girlfriend Jackie (Camilla Velasco).

The two presume she’s
in there for an internet-
arranged booty call, but
soon discover that it's a
dank, labyrinthine tor-
ture dungeon manned
by a couple of semi-re-
tired fascists-in-hiding.
The weapon of choice
for the septuagenarian
psychos is a highly dis-
tilled preparation of ni-
troglycerin fashioned
from crates of dynamite
stolen during the brutal
Dirty War, an actual pe-
riod in Argentina’s his-
tory (1976- 1983) when
military rulers committed numerous crimes against
the nation’s supposed dissidents and subversives.
Murderous friends since childhood, Gordon (Omar
Musa) and his hulking henchman Baxter (Omar
Gioisa) have taken to using the volatile concoction
against youngsters who are lured to the grounds
by phony internet profiles. Upon discovering Jackie
bound to a table, Roman and Ali hatch an escape
plan. The only catch is that Jackie’s covered head-
to-toe with the explosive substance so their exit
must be anything but quick, lest they end up paint-
ing the walls with their own guts. Luckily, Gordon
can't move without his walker. This gives way to
some tense but hilarious chase scenes. Really...
slow... chase... scenes. The basement full of hun-
gry, pissed-off human experiments that assault
everyone, hero and villain alike, don’t help matters
much either. And yet, perhaps the biggest victim in
all of this is the audience.

A fim trlUrifn 6iref»

Mf t)«)P COULD 9e /OUR LAST

OVERLOOKED, FORGOHEN AND DISMISSED

mis ISSUE: LANCE DOES MASSACRE MO

CORPORATE DOWKSiZiNG

CORPORATE CUTTHROAT MASSACRE

MVD Visual

I’m always amazed by how movies that have the word “massacre” in the title
often have really low body counts. Such is the case with this lame offering
from Creep Creepersin (He, Peeping Blo0. Set almost exclusively within the
confines of a couple of office cubicles, it follows a group of employees forced
to stay late one evening by their tyrannical boss, who has announced that she
plans to fire two of them before daybreak. More of a horror-comedy than a
slasher flick, the cardboard cast of stereotypes (slut, drunk, man-whore, ditz, nerd, creepy custodian)
do a shitload of talking and plotting but the slaying doesn’t start ’til the final ten minutes. Combine
that with an inability to meet this month’s death quota and sorry, Mr. Creepersin - you’re fired!
BODY COUNT: 8

AOPM (AVERAGE DEATHS PER MINUTE): 1 every 8.75 minutes

STRINGS ATTNGHEG, THINGS GETAGHEG

THE PUPPET MONSTER MASSACRE

MVD Visual

This one stars the same kind of puppets we all watched on Sesame Street, but
I don't recall those felt-covered fops screwing in graveyarrjs or getting shot
with assault rifles. After receiving invitations to spend a night in a mansion for
a chance to win a million bucks, five teenagers discover that a mad scientist
plans to feed them to a monster that he created for the Nazis. (Imagine if H.R.
Giger worked on The Muppet S/70wand you’re almost there.) Rimed on a green
screen and featuring decent CGI, tiiis is a hilarious film with great dialogue, good gore and a high
body count. If you liked Meet the Peebles or Team America: World Police, you’re gonna love this.

The blood and felt will fly!

BODY COUNT: 58 (+ 2 bunnies)
ADPM: 1 every 1.17 minutes

T9P HONOURS FOR GONERS

THE SUMMER OF MASSACRE

Breaking Glass/Vicious Circle

Hold on tight, kiddies: this anthology allegedly holds the Guinness World Record
for the highest body count in a slasher film. "Rampage” follows a guy who em-
barks on a killing spree with a colourful array of weaponry (TV remotes, skate-
boards, a potato peeler) after he himself is viciously mutilated while jogging.
“Lump" stars sexy Brinke Stevens as a mother whose deformed child seeks
bloody revenge on the people who tried to kill her. “Son of the Boogeyman"
explores what happens to a guy who discovers that his childhood nightmare nemesis is real. And
“Bum” pits a group of teenagers against a mythical madman with a penchant for torture and torch-
ings. Rife with gore and horrible performances, this is a great watch and an even better drinking
game!

BODY COUNT: 155 (+ 2 deer)

ADPM: 1 every 37 seconds

UST CHANCE LANCE

Save for some exquisite slow-motion sequences and
an interesting parallel between the old fascist Gordon
and his delicate nitroglycerin creation. Cold Sweat is a
rather non-explosive affair. The Argentine perspective on
recent real-life atrocities would be better served by a
filmmaker without such an overt fondness for House of
1000 Corpses, and with a far better script.

TAL ZIMERMAN

DISARMED AND DANGEROUS
YAKUZA WEAPON

Starring Tak Sakagiichi, Mei Kiirokawa and Jun Murakami
Vlrittan and Oimctcd by Tak Sakagiichi and Yudai Yamaguchi
WcIlUo Usa

Not only did actor and stuntman Tak Sakaguchi (Mutant
Girls Squad) co-wrile and co-direct this movie (with Yudai
Yamaguchi; Meatball Machine), he shot it in twelve days,
and even starred in it. Ambitious indeed, but how will it
stand up to its lineage of blood-splattered predecessors,
such as cult hits Machine Girl and Tokyo Gore Police'?

Based on the popular manga Gokudd Heikib'f the late
Ken Ishikawa, Yakuza Weapon starts off as a promising
action-sci-fi flick (with choreography by YOji Shimomura:
Alien vs. Ninja) featuring the typical Sushi Typhoon sen-
sibilities; hammy joke-acting, crudely shot green-toned
hand-held camera work, splatter galore, and a murder-
revenge plotline - this time based on the Kumi crime out-
fits of the Japanese mafia.

When crime lord Kenzo
Iwaki (Akaji Maro) is as-
sassinated, his son Shozo
(Sakaguchi) leaves his
South American merce-
nary base to return home
to Japan, only to find
himself in the middle of a
huge gang war, Plus, his
family has disbanded and
his best friend Tetsu (Jun
Murakami) is now a drug
addict who just got out of
prison and goes mental when his sister is brutally mur-
dered. Since he was last in Japan, Shozo developed the
uncanny power of invincibility, and now lives with the be-
lief that if you aren’t afraid of getting hit by bullets or
stepping on land mines, nothing can hurt you. He is
wrong.

Eventually he gets his arm and leg graphically blown
off in the middle of a fight and, about halfway through
the movie, is fit with bionic weapon replacements: a ma-
chine-gun arm and a rocket launcher for a kneecap.
Craziness ensues with mind-control powers, automatic-
weapon toting nurses and even Tetsu 's dead sister get-
ting turned into a multi-gun, with the ability to shoot
something out of every orifice (yep, that one too).

But as fun as this all sounds, predictably, the movie
drags on for ages, and by Sushi Typhoon standards this
almost falls short of being a splatter flick (though there
are some gunfight gore gags, such as being able to see
right through a victim's bullet-punctured skull). The focus
here is on over-complicated mafia politics and drawn- .
out fight sequences. While far better than the last few re-
leases that have come out of Nikattsu studios, it still
makes one wonder if Ishikawa is spinning in his grave.

JES5A SOBCZUK

REAL ESTATE

TWO REFURBISHED HAUNTED HOUSE
FILMS, ONE DISTRIBUTOR. CAN EITHER OF
THESE eONE TITLES BUILD ANYTHING'
DECENT ON A SOLID FOUNDATION?

SILENT HOUSE

Starring Elizabeth Olsen, Adam Trese and Eric Sheffer Stevens
Directed by Chris Kentis and Laura Lau

Starring Daniel Craig, Naomi Watts and Rachel Weisz
Directed by Jim Sheridan

Written by Laura Lau

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Horror movie hucksterism didn't die out with William Castle, but it did lose a
chunk of its joie de vivre. The real-time experience promised by Silent House isn’t
as cool as the possibility of being electrocuted - or, at least, startled - by your
own movie seat, but it's something, and filmmakers Chris Kentis and Laura Lau
(who chucked their actors in with live sharks for 2003’s Open Watei) pull off the
single, uninterrupted-shot gimmick with surprising effectiveness for most of the
film’s 86-minute running time. Ultimately,
though, this House is built on a shaky founda-
tion, and a clumsy ending brings it crashing
down.

Based on 201 0's La Casa Muda, widely con-
sidered to be the best, urn, Uruguayan single-
take haunted-house movie ever made. Silent
Wouse follows Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen), a fragile
young woman who travels to her family’s vaca-
tion house to help her dickish father get it ready
to sell. From the beginning, it’s clear that ail is
not right with the place - or, for that matter, with
Sarah herself. She has no memory of the child-
hood friend who shows up for a visit, and her
relationships with her father and her Uncle
Peter, who stops by to lend a hand, just feel off.
Before tong, Sarah’s dad is attacked by an unseen assailant, and the girl is trapped
in the house with no protector and no means of escape. What follows is a dizzying
and unnerving game of hide-and-seek that finds Sarah alternately running and
stowing away from the mysterious home invaders.

The middle chunk of the movie is undeniably creepy and there’s some genuine
elegance in the cinematography, which involved passing the camera from one op-
erator to the next to achieve the film's allegedly uninterrupted shot. But the real
star of the show is. well, the star of the show, Thanks to the film's single take con-
ceit (or, cynically, handful of really long takes and cleverly concealed cuts). Olsen
gets to do some old-fashioned stage acting, and she's terrific. It's too bad that
she’s overshadowed by the rickety ending that jettisons the ambiguity of the orig-
inal film and spells everything out in a painfully contrived way. Buyer beware.

APRIL SNELLINGS

A-list talent doesn’t necessarily equal good movie. Despite being directed by a
six-time Academy Award nominee and boasting a star-studded cast, Dream House
is easily one of 201 1 ’s worst big-screen genre pictures; a horrible mess from front
door to back porch.

Jim Sheridan {My Left Foot) helms this story of aspiring author Will Atenton (an
often shirtless Daniel Craig), who leaves his day job as an editor to write the next
great novel and spend more time with his beautiful wife (real-life partner Rachel
Weisz) and two angelic daughters in their seemingly perfect new house. Cue the
strange events. A shadowy figure watches
hie residence at night; a group of punks are
found performing rituals in the basement; and
someone tries to run Will over with a car. The
cops seem to know something but they aren’t
talking, and neither is the hot blonde neigh-
bour (Naomi Watts).

Will investigates, and discovers that a bru-
tal murder once took place in his home, at
the hands of someone named Peter Ward.

After more sleuthing, Will finds out that Peter
is in fact - get ready for it - himself! Of
course he is. i mean, this sort of things hap-
pens all the time so why shouldn’t it be a plot
device in every thriller nowadays? Of course,
this obvious twist would be more effective if

it didn't happen at the film’s halfway point After Will is revealed to be an insane
killer and his perfect family just a figment constructed from his victims’ memories,
Dream Wouse descends into a confusing, nonsensical series of “is it real or fantasy?"
set pieces, eventually settling on a cheesy, out-of-place action-packed finale.

One can only surmise that someone saw Shutter Island and figured they
throw another ail-star cast into the same narrative device and ride it safely to
bank. However, not only did Dream House- which borrows liberally from the
Korean film A Tale of Two Sisters- bomb, the cast and crew were reportedly so
pissed with the studio’s final cut that they refused to do any promotion, and Sheridan
even petitioned to have his name taken off of it, Not a wise investment.

AARON VON LUPTON

ISUND OF LOST LIVES

BAHLE RDYALE: THE COMPLETE
COLLECTION (2000)

Starring Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda
and Taro Yamamoto
Written and directed by Kinji Fukasaku
Anchor Bay

When Battle Royale premiered at film festivals twelve
years ago, it had the makings of an instant cult classic.
Unfortunately, the release coincided with the Columbine
high school massacre aftermath,
meaning North American disfrib-
utors weren't exactly falling all
over themselves to buy an over-
the-top bloodbath of a movie
about 42 high school students
chosen by lottery and forced to
kill each other off on a deserted
island.

As predicted, though, the
movie became an iconic horror
flick in the ensuing decade,
prompting Anchor Bay to finally
give Battle Royale its due with
this first official North American
release - a spectacular four-disc
box set, bound like a blood-spat-
tered hardcover textbook. Inside, each disc is housed
in a cardboard page covered with glossy art and pro-
duction stills. Not bad for a disgusting little movie that
once seemed destined to only be available as either a
bootleg or an import.

And the film itself, based on the book by Koushun
Takami, has aged remarkably well. The concept still
feels sprung from a deranged mind deserving of incar-
ceration (even by Japanese horror standards), and di-
rector Kinji Fukasaku (who was 70 at the time) doesn’t
miss a singie opportunity to test your gag reflex, inject
social satire or resort to giggly slapstick violence. Even
the corny teen-love scenes ooze with camp appeal.

Both the theatrical and director's cut are included and
each has merit, depending on whether one's preference
Is succinct carnage or narrative clarity. Battle Royale 2
is also part of the package, and while it’s decent, the
A//ens-inspired “This Time It's War" approach never
quite works. The disjointed sequel
falls far short of its predecessor,
likely due to the sudden mid-pro-
duction death of Fukasaku, whose
son then took over the reins.

Unlike all the murky bootlegs
and slapdash Tartan imports, An-
chor Bay's new transfers finally
present the films as the glossy
pop-art blockbusters they are, and
the renewed vibrance of the
comic-book visuals only enhances
the film's heightened ultra-violent
tone. Special features include a
thorough 50-minute making-of
documentary, several candid fea-
turettes on various aspects of pro-
duction, and a collection of trailers. All of it has
appeared on previous releases, but nothing is missing
and the presentation has never been prettier. This in-
stantly qualifies as the definitive Battle Royale set.

PHIL BROWN

BAND. MEET WAGON

FULL MOON'S GRINDNOUSE COLLECTION:
THE COMPILATIONS (1978-1987)™

Starring Elvira, John Carradine and Sybil banning
Directed by Ken Dixon
Full Moon

After multiple advancements in the ways in which we
discover, share and view movies, it’s easy to see why the
once-popular but extremely dated horror compilation
videos of the 1980s have
taken this long to be reis-
sued. Fan support exists
within the VHS trading and
bootleg communities, but
only because these comps
hadn’t been released to
DVD. They’re that sad kid
who couldn't fit on the bus
to the future, remembered
by those who were there
but few others.

Nostalgia, however, can
be powerful. Fans rejoiced
at the inclusion of Terror in the Aisles {^QQA) on the recent
Halloween //Blu-ray release, and a similar yearning is
what Charles Band is banking on with Full Moon’s Grind-
house Collection, a series of reissues from the early di-
rect-to-video era, including four compilations that are
available on DVD for the
first time.

Between the trailers and
clips, these aptly titled
discs feature moments
created by Band and direc-
tor Ken Dixon, wherein a
horror celeb addresses the
audience directly. In The
Best of Sex and Violence
(1981), John Carradine
tells us how crappy he
thought the preceding clip
was. Statuesque cult icon
Sybil Canning strips and reads from cue cards in Famous
T&A (1 982). Elvira hosts Film Gore (1 983), delivering hor-
ror puns stretched so far, they could only have been writ-
ten by Forrest J Ackerman (they were). The host-free
exception is Zombiethon (1986), featuring girls being
chased by zombies into a
movie theatre full of even
more zombies. Despite such
dated cheesiness, the
comps have retained a kind
of charm.

Though the revival now
feels a bit old. Band's own
attempt to qualify these films
as “grindhouse" misses an
opportunity to jump on the
'80s retro train. Given his in-
volvement with seminal
home entertainment labels Wizard (original distnbutors
of many titles in the set), Media, Cult Entertainment and
Empire Video, Band should accept his crown as rightful
Prince of the VHS era over being a footnote in ’70s ex-
ploitation. Then again, trying to teach marketing to the
creator of ten Puppet Master tWm is fruitless.

TALZIMERMAN

mmi

ALL HORNS AND
SATAN'S BLOOD (1978)“™

Starring Angel Aranda, Sandra Alberti and Mariana Karr
Written and directed by Carlos Puerto
Scorpion Releasing

I’ve watched quite a few films about devil worship in
my day but few have featured ritual scenes so raunchy
as those depicted in Satan's Blood, a.k.a. Escalofrio,
which would be more fitting in a porn flick.

In this steamy Spanish shocker, Andy (Jose Maria Guil-
len) and his four-months pregnant wife Annie (Mariana
Karr) are out for a relaxing day with their dog when they're
approached by another couple, Bruno (Angel Aranda) and
his wife Mary (Sandra Al-
berti), Though several years
older, the man claims to be
a former college classmate
of Andy’s and invites the
pair back home for drinks
and to look through old
photos, Alex has no recol-
lection of Bruno, but he and
Annie accept the offer and
follow the couple to their
isolated manor. Over wine
and cheese, they discuss
the occult before engaging in a Ouija board
session, where they manage to invoke a spirit
that reveals (among other things) Annie’s past
infidelity and a prediction that Bruno will die by
suicide.

Upset but unable to leave due to a fearsome
storm, Alex and Annie are forced to stay the
night. They soon discover their hosts sitting
stark naked on a pentagram-decorated carpet,
calling upon Satan. Placed in a trance, the pair
is drawn into a full-on orgy; as the foursome
engages in sweaty sex in multiple positions, a
picture of Christ bursts into flames on the wall.

The following day, the spent couple once again
attempts to leave, only to discover their dog, car and hosts
mysteriously missing. Will Alex and Annie escape this
house of evil alive?

Released less than three years after the death of Span-
ish dictator General Francisco Franco, Satan 's Blood was
reportedly one of the country’s first films to sport an S-
rating (roughly equivalent to an X-rating), which led to a
relaxing of Spain’s formerly oppressive censorship laws.
But for all its full-frontal nudity and scenes of copulation,
it still retains a strong atmosphere of unease and dread,
with echoes of Rosemary's Baby. Part of the Katarina's
Nightmare Theater line - which means tiiere’s an intro
and outro from former wrestler Katarina Leigh Waters -
extras include a stills gallery and trailers for other Scorpion
releases.

JAMES BURRELL

WHERE’S THE BEA^

THE MAGNETIC MONSTER (1953)"™

Starring Richard Carlson, King Donovan and Jean Byron

Directed by Curt Siodmak

Written by Curt Siodmak and Ivan Tors

MGM

Writer Curt Siodmak had great ideas and knew how to
let them unfold on the page. You can see it in his literary-

Gurozuka: Yet another
terrifying tape.

minded scripts for such crackerjack dassics as Dono-
van's Brain (which was adapted from his novel), as well
as The Wolf Man and some of the other Universal horror
entries. The Magnetic Monster, one of a handful of films
Siodmak also directed, tries desperately to overcome its
poor production values with an inventive, unorthodox plot
and a convincing scientific air.

Richard Carlson, who made a big impression in tirat
same year's It Came From Outer Space, is very credible
as Dr. Stewart, a mystery-solving
physicist from the government's
Office of Scientific Investigation -
a Quatermass Jr. of sorts. He and
his pipe-chomping partner (King
Donovan) are sent out to inspect a
rash of reports of metal objects be-
coming inexplicably magnetized
around town. After their Geiger
counters go crazy at each scene,
they discover a dangerously unsta-
ble radioactive isotope that’s grow-
ing at an alarming rate and could
topple Earth off its axis. Once they
trace this back to the invisible intruder, their only hope is
special scientific equipment in Canada that may be able
to destroy the magnetic menace with a high-powered
electron shower.

Tapping into the same nuclear panic that would fuel
the horror genre for the better part of the decade. The
Magnetic Monster is a fine but never wholly successful
1 950s genre exercise. It struggles to tell a clever, sophis-
ticated story with almost no money - not unlike trying to
push together two opposing magnetic poles. Though
effectively scripted around stock footage and budget
constraints - the “invisible” monster surely saved a
couple bucks - there’s still a lingering poverty row
vibe to the project, including bargain effects, ponder-
ous narration by Carlson to explain the science at
work and an explosive climax that’s nicked from the
German sci-fi film, Gold (^9Z4).

Yet there’s still something about The Magnetic Monster
that pulls you in - it's a cut above the sometimes juvenile
genre films of its day, with Dr. Stewart approaching the
problem using sound scientific methodology, and an on-
slaught of jargon and loving shots of lab equipment. Ifs
too talky and bloodless to compete with The Quatermass
Xperimentirom a few years later, but the way Siodmak
creates a believable world with mature themes certainly
points the way for horror’s heyday in the ’60s and ’70s.

PAUL CORUPE

LINGER ING CURSE
GUROZUKA (2005) """

Starring Yoko Mitsuya, Yuko ltd and Nozomi Ando
Directed by Ydictii Nishiyama
Written by Tadayoshi Kubo and Ao Murata
Synapse

When fl/ngt/ first hit the-
atres back in 1998, it
quickly inspired a glut of
Japanese films centred
upon cursed objects. From
videotapes to women’s
shoes, wigs to cellphones-
even the most unassuming
item could suddenly be-
come something frightful.

And even though that con-
ceit was starting to wear
incredibly thin by 2005, director Yoichi Nishiyama de-
cided to dive headfirst into its shallow waters anyway
and came up with Gurozuka. And just like Ringu, this
one’s about a cursed videotape.

It begins promisingly enough: a group of female stu-
dents treks off to a remote inn nestled deep in the woods
in order to make a movie for their audio-visual club. Once
settled in, they discover an old videotape from seven
years prior, when the club had been disbanded amid ru-
mours of a missing girl and another who went insane.
The recording depicts a horrific murder, in which a girl in
a mask violently slays another girl with a knife, but for
some inexplicable reason, the students decide to try to
finish watching the film even after it’s revealed that it was
made in the same lodge at which they’re staying.

The deigan mask itself is probably the creepiest thing
in the whole movie. Originally used in ancient Japanese
plays, it depicts the twisted face of a jealous woman. Its
unnerving effectiveness, however, is consistently marred
by Nishiyama’s ham-fisted direction, which - in an effort
to disguise the fact that Gurozuka is comprised of little
more than a bunch of teenage girls squabbling with each
other as the bodies pile up all around them - includes far
too many jump scares, off-screen kills and waking night-
mare moments.

Set all of that to a jarring, horribly edited soundtrack,
and you may as well hurl Gurozuka into the unforgiving
realm of delete-bin duds. Sayonara, sucker!

LAST CHANCE LANCE

lU'l MOlUnil A' 0 \T

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TORIES SET IN SPOOKY OLD HOUSES

are one of the longest traditions in horror
cinema - offering perhaps the perfect
mix of familiar objects in an unfamiliar
space, triggering a kind of electric suspense that’s
perfect for exploitation by crafty filmmakers. And the
tradition is still extremely healthy: look at The Woman
in Blades Eel Marsh Mouse or even the decrepit
manor in Alexandre Bustlllo and Julien Maury’s Livid,
which takes the house-as-person idea to extraordi-
nary lengths. As a horror film setting, the role of the
dwelling has evolved considerably overthe last cen-
tury, changing from tiie classic eerie Old Dark House
where disguised criminal masterminds with sinister
motives were lurking, to tiie more modern take
where the buildings themselves become the source
of evil.

But long before seemingly every decaying manor
was outfitted with a basement operating table and
rusty surgical tools, all the hapless heiresses and
dopey DAs of classic Old Dark House movies had to
worry about was a phantom hand emerging from be-
hind a wall panel or a mysterious crashing chandelier
or two. This approach may seem tame compared to
contemporary big-screen shockers -a painted por-
trait with moving eyes is nothing
compared to tire murderous entity
in the f^ranormaf Activity Wlm -
but that emphasis on mystery
over carnage has made the Old
Dark House subgenre one of the
most enticing gateways for
younger viewers who can imme-
diately recognize the pure
macabre fun that makes up the
foundation of these classic early
entries. For me, American Interna-
tional Pictures’ 1959 trifle Ghost
of Dragstrip Hoiiow was the film
that tipped the scale, presenting
the genre's mouldiest cliches in
such an infectious way that it brought me far deeper
into the labyrinth of horror than Frankenstein or his
Universal pals ever managed.

Perhaps it was meant to be. in my younger days, I
was entranced by the possibilities of the Old Dark
Mouse, voraciously reading Hardy Boys books about
discovering secret passages behind grandfather

clocks and loving every minute of watching Shaggy
and Scooby-Doo uncover smugglers who used hid-
den projectors to make spooky old inns seem over-
run with ghosts. Even tiien, 1 knew that Old Dark
Houses presented a world of exciting secrets hiding
just underneath mundane everyday
reality, the chance to uncover forbid-
den places where you could follow
your own instincts far away from the
prying eyes of adults.

Casually connecting the dots be-
tween The Cat and the Canary{]927)
and Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?
(1969), Ghost of Dragstrip Hoiiow
starts out much like a typical hot rod
film before it veers sharply into Old
Dark House territory. A group of
squeaky clean teens discover that
they could lose their car club’s garage
due to disapproving parents and
overly judgmental authority figures.
Enter eccentric Aunt Anastasia (Dorothy Neumann),
who agrees to let the kids convert her old mansion
into a clubhouse, provided they can get rid of the res-
ident spook. They spend a frightful night complete
with clutching hands, secret fireplace passageways
and creepy wails from behind the wall. When they
decide a rockin’ Halloween dance might flush out the

bad spirits, they discover AlP’s real-life monster-
maker and FX artist Paul Blaisdell, clad conspicu-
ously in the costume he created for The
She-Creature (1 956), trying to scare outsiders away
from his lonely monster-themed pity party.

No one could confuse a double-feature bottom-
feeder such as Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow (currently
available as a Midnite Movie from MGM, along with
Ghost in the Invisible Bikinli with a good - or even
scary - film, but it's still surprisingly successful,
wrapping up the bare essence of Old Dark House ap-
peal in a ’50s teen culture of custom cars, monster
movies, malt shops, crazy slang and blazing rock ’n’
roll instrumentals. The film is more than just a fun
and goofy take on the genre, though. It’s also an eas-
ily accessible portal to cinematic horror for anyone
willing to move beyond the familiar monster movie
landmarks. Before younger viewers are ready to ven-
ture into any bedroom plagued by paranormal activ-
ity. The Evil Dead cabin, the Overlook Hotel or even
Hell House, Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow presents the
unique Old Dark House trappings in a decidedly re-
latable way but without directly pandering to kids.
And even though boundaries were made to be
pushed, decidedly safe horror films like this one are
important, because no matter how adult and sophis-
ticated the genre gets, younger fans still need road
markers to get them there. ^

1431

CAME

BOWEN'S:.

BASEMENT

[-INS, DELETE BINS AND OTHER SI

^oo^ew

Hl^VvVS

vJ. ^><509^^

I 'd been waiting anxiously outside the basement
door for nearly 45 minutes when the extermina-
tor- a dour, fish-faced gent of-vagueiy Slavic
descent, reeking of Brut 33 and broken dreams -
finaily emerged. He fixed me with a baiefui eye and
intoned, “I’m afraid the prognosis isn’t good, Mr.
Bowen. You've got... (dramatic pause...) Boogens!"
“Boogens?" I echoed weakly, “Is that serious?"
“Serious?” he barked with a mirthless laugh. “I’ll
be back tomorrow with my men and the appropriate
equipment."

Okay, so that’s not how it really went down, but
that’s what the term "boogens” has always brought
to mind. Here, on the other hand, is the real deal.

The Boogens (1 982) is yet another of those fun lit-
tle films that fell between the cracks largely due to
bad timing: a monster movie that had the misfortune
to drop during the dawn of the slasher film craze. Oh
sure, the creature feature wasn’t exactly facing ex-
tinction by the end of the ’70s, but if you weren’t
building a bigger, badder
space monster (Alien, The
Thin^, breathing new life
into tired old European ar-
chetypes for American au-
diences (An American
Werewolf in London, The
Howling) or just gleefully
ramping up the gore and
nudity (Humanoids From
the Deep), you were kinda
doomed. And this was ex-
actly when ffte Boogens -
low-budget, slowish and,
while not timid by most
standards, not exactly
splatter-intensive - en-
tered the fray.

We open on that time-
tested set-up device, the
Montage of Mouldy Old

a Bygone Era™, inform-
silver mine in a small Colorado town is
down after a series of cave-ins, disappear-

ances and fatal accidents. Then, KABOOM! A dyna-
mite charge goes off, it’s suddenly the ’80s and the
mine is reopened despite the protestations of the
local Old Crazy Dude'^^^, "You’re all doomed! it’s got
a death curse!” Crazy Ralph rants
the camp counsellors, who. . .
oh wait, wrong Old Crazy Dude'^'^
from the early ’80s - they all kind
of run together after a while,
don't you find?

Anyhow, shit starts going hor-
ribly wrong again, and there are
growing suspicions that it can’t
ail be chalked up to bad luck or
workplace safety standards that
would barely make the grade in
China. Nope, it’s the fabled “tun-
nel creatures” that have been
awakened by the blasting and
are once again skulking about in
the dark, murdering miners,
causing cave-ins and commit-
ting various other wanton acts of
boogenry like they fucking well
own the place or something.
They also manage to infiltrate various local domiciles
through heating ducts and such, but except for brief
glimpses of slimy appendages, we don’t get a

proper Monster Reveal until around the .
third act, a factor that has reputedly caused prob- '
lems for some viewers. Our boogens turn out to
be rubbery, puppety, turtle-lookin’ amphibly-oids
with big teeth and gnarly tentacles, the latter
being the species’ weapon of choice most of the '
time.

When I was researching The Boogens recently,

I was surprised to discover it’s actually an Ameri-
can film. I’d spent years under the misapprehen-
sion that it was Canadian, a typical product of the ^
tax shelter era, but no - it’s just cheap and very '
snowy. It’s directed by TV veteran James L. Con-
way, whose credits range from Matt Houston to
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Supernatural] and
the cast is competent, headed by Rebecca Balding
(TV’s Charmed), an appealing girl-next-door type
who gamely supplies us with a bit of nudity. Hey,
who doesn’t like some boobies with their
boogens?

Stephen King gave The Boogens a surprisingly
good review in Twilight Zone magazm back in the
day, but despite retaining a significant following, it
remains unavailable on DVD. I’d invite you to stick
around and watch my ancient VHS copy, but the ex-
terminator's due back any time now, so you’d best
get the hell out of my basement, lest you get your
ass fatally blasted with Boog' spray. 9 •

M^jm Howr \H vmsm

mmHmmmHpi

3U% O*

ri..

DEAR CREATURE
Jonathan Case
TOR Books

INNER SANCTUM
Ernie Colon

NBM

XOMBI SHOWCASE PRESENTS: ROAD RAGE #1 OF 4 ARMY OF DARKNESS #1

JohnRozum GHOSTS VOLUME 1 Stephen King, Joe Hill, Elliott R. Serrano and

and Frazer Irving Various Chris Ryall and Nelson Daniel Marat Mychaels

DC DC IDW Dynamite

W illiam Shakespeare isn’t the first name that
comes to mind when thoughts turn to hor-
ror. There is, nevertheless, much in the
Bard’s work that modern genre writers can
look to for inspiration, whether it’s tormented
ghosts and apparitions, heaping bouts of mad-
ness, doomed romances or copious amounts of
bioodshed.

Dear Creature, a new graphic novel written and
illustrated by Jonathan Case and available now
from TOR Books, takes its cue from the Bard -
with a smattering of horror conventions - to pro-
duce a unique and fascinating tale that manages
to be epic, funny, romantic, dramatic, disturbing,
horrific, tragic and uplifting. In a word, Shake-
spearean.

“I grew up going to Shakespeare plays as a kid,
and trained as an actor in college," says Case. “I
was always interested in performance, and the-
atrical storytelling, but I also loved drawing. In my
early twenties, 1 wrote and staged a play on the
beach that served as the genesis of Dear Crea-
ture. Afterwards, on a lark, I drew a mini-comic
spinoff, and that sort of got me thinking about
comics as a way to fuse my storytelling interests
- writing, performance and drawing.”

Case took his love of Shakespeare and com-
bined it with his childhood crush on monsters (“I
had a special affection for
tragic, ugly, egocentric
beasties”), ultimately pro-
ducing Dear Creature. It’s
the story of Grue, a reptil-
ian gill-man with a pen-
chant for speaking in
iambic pentameter and
eating horny teenagers.

Grue is filled with remorse
at his actions and takes
solace in the torn pages
of Shakespeare’s works
he mysteriously finds in-
side empty bottles of Kiki
Cola. Determined to stop
eating people, he desper-
ately searches for the
person responsible for the castaway messages.
This eventually leads him to Giulietta, a middle-
aged agoraphobe who’s barricaded herself away
from the world Inside a cabin on her sister’s boat.

The two star-crossed lovers quickly
connect, but like Romeo and Juliet,
obstacles soon present themselves.

Giulietta's nephew is being blamed
for the teenage disappearances. Can
Grue own up to his past before the
law catches up to him and Giulietta,
or is their new-found love doomed?

Case has filled his story with many
Shakespearean elements: a hero
haunted by his past, grim portents,
mistaken identities, jesters, forces of
nature, madness and self-imposed
exile. However, lest ye non-Shake-
speare fans fret. Case merely uses
these as a springboard to tell a
broader tale that encapsulates a wide
range of familiar B-horror movie ele-
ments.

Along with promiscuous teens,
there’s the misunderstood creature, a
mad scientist with requisite labora-
tory, a damsel in distress, an angry
mob of villagers, a gypsy woman and
a giant squid.

“I wanted to take those classic
monster and B-movie tropes and fuse
them with some highbrow influences:

theatre, idealized ro-
mance, art house flicks
from the '60s,’’ explains
Case. "Things you get
beat up for liking,"

Me also believes Shakespeare and
horror movies have another thing in
common; the ability to mesh a num-
ber of different elements success-
fully into one story, allowing romance
and comedy to comfortably exist
alongside horror and tragedy. It's a
challenging balance but Dear Crea-
ture pulls it off with style, primarily
because the story's focus remains
firmly on Grue.

Like many Shakespearean heroes,
Grue is deeply flawed, yet the
reader's sympathies remain with him throughout
the story. Was this a challenge for the author, con-
sidering that the protagonist is. after all, a man-
eating monster?

"I started the story with his ‘monstery’ moment
of clarity," says Case. “Sort of where he realizes
he can't go on with this flowery, idealistic brain
and his animalistic behaviour winning out every
time. I hoped that would keep him relatable as a
character, with an edge of danger: when is he
going to slip up and eat someone? I tried to play a
lot of it for laughs, too. Readers expect the irre-
sponsible teenagers to get it, so it's fun to play
with those expectations and expand upon why
that's true for every monster story, Since Grue isn’t
human, you can’t really fault him for wanting to
eat humans. That's really what I love in monster
stories. Monsters are just relatable enough to
make you sad for their plight, and strange enough
to make their human-eating seem natural. Enjoy-
able, even!” 9

R mqi

REVIEWS BT PEDRO CABEZUELO

Classic horror fans rejoice! Comic veteran Ernie Colon adapts four stories originally written and performed for 1 940s
radio show Inner Sanctum Mystery. The taies themselves are standard horror anthology fare, with the standout being
“Alive in the Grave,” the story of a down-on-his-luck petty thief who believes he’s responsible for a man’s premature
burial. I have followed Color's work for more than 30 years and I can honestly say the man’s art just keeps getting better.
His pencils are fantastic, his layout of panels visually exciting and his use of shading and contrast a textbook example
of how to draw black and white comics.

2011 will , go down in history as the year DC
made one huge screw-up after another, including that
awful new logo some shaky reworkings of several ti-
tles. Case in point; cancelling the critically acclaimed
Xombi after a mere six issues to make way for a
ridiculous New 52 re-
boot/revamp/rewhat-
ever. However, I will
give them credit for
pulling their heads out
of the sand long
enough to release this
collected edition. David
Kim is a nanotechnol-
ogy scientist who is vir-
tually immortal, thanks
to an army of nanoma-
chines living inside his
body, constantly rebuilding him. Unfortunately, this has
also turned him into some kind of weirdness magnet,
attracting bizarre dangers such as lethal snow angels,
blood mummies and demon trick-or-treaters. John
Rozum is a pro at conjuring such outlandish concepts,
but he keeps them grounded enough to remain sus-
penseful and horrific, and it’s all ably supported by
Frazer Irving’s bravado art. A definite must-buy for
horror comics fans.

I have yet to review any
of these black and white,
phonebook-sized reprint col-
lections, so consider this a
write-up not only of this par-
ticular volume but also previ-
ous books reprinting classic
House of Mystery, House of
Secrets and others in DC’s
horror stable. Reprinting
Ghosts #1-8, this hefty (yet
very reasonably priced) tome
is a great dip into horror sto-
ries of yore. Sure, many of

these ’70s-era stories are predictable and some-
what cheesy, but they’re also incredibly endearing.

I usually avoid the
Showcase super-
hero books simply
because I prefer my
men in tights to be
in colour, but the
black and white
newsprint works
perfectly for these
old terror tales. A
fun and cost-effec-
tive way to bolster
your horror comics
library.

Road Ra^ fs a project with a fine pedigree:
an adaptation of Richard Matheson's Duel, by way
of Stephen King and son Joe Hill's homage, Throt-
tle. For those unfamiliar, Duel is the tale of a casual
driver terrorized by a mysterious trucker on the
open, desert highways. This is a tribute to Duel
that pits bikers against the sadistic rig. Two issues
will be devoted to each of the stories, kicking off
with this introduction to the biker gang, The Tribe,
which begins filling in the charac-
ters’ questionable pasts before a
confrontation with the big black
truck. Much of the first half is dull
exposition and Nelson Daniel’s art
- while dynamic enough for the
later action scenes - lacks the de-
tail necessary to tell the bikers
apart. Once the altercation begins,
though, the story picks up consid-
erably.

From the outset of this new
volume in the popular Army of
Darkness series, it’s obvious that
writer Elliott R. Serrano wants to

shake things up by
sidelining Bruce
Campbell's popular
Ash character in
favour of a female
Ash, presumably
from some alter-
nate timeline/dimension. Although events have
transpired somewhat differently for female Ash, the
results are basically the same: she's stuck in the
past (in this case, Cleopatra’s Egypt) fighting Dea-
dites with one hand turned into a makeshift
weapon. But female Ash’s transform-into-anything
mitt is a bizarre and poor substitute for male Ash’s
chainsaw. It’s early days yet, and male Ash is
clearly forthcoming, but for the moment this seems
like a pale, unnecessary imitation of the story it’s
supposed to be building upon.

ORIGINALMOVIE
POSTERS FROM 1950s
lOPRESENTDftY
NEWANDOilTOF
PRIfirniM BOOKS

WWW.HCANTEEN.COM

ROGER CORMAN: INTERVIEWS

Constantine Nasr, ed.
University Press of Mississippi

Roger Corman

INTERVIEWS

When being interviewed, fiimmakers, actors
and other movie business folks often fall back
into the same tired anecdotes. Facing a question
they’ve heard a hundred times before about a
project they barely remember, it’s understandable
that the same practiced stories get dragged out
again and again. Not so
with Roger Corman: Inter-
views, however, a new
collection of mostly previ-
ously published discus-
sions with the reigning
King of the Bs.This supe-
rior release avoids that
pitfall by featuring sixteen
interviews plucked from a
span of more than 50
years, offering not only a
chance to witness Gor-
man’s development as a filmmaker, but the evo-
lution of his attitudes towards his work.

Editor Constantine Nasr has done a fine job of
selecting a wide range of pieces from many cru-
cial points in Gorman’s career. That’s not to say
some familiar tales don’t show up, though. No
Corman tome would be complete without high-
lighting the lessons learned from his poorest-per-
forming picture. The Intruder (1962), or how
blockbuster B-movies such as Jaws tried to steal
his thunder. But what’s really interesting is the
fresh perspective Corman offers on films that
were new at the time - it’s doubtful he remem-
bers much of B-quickies such as Gunslinger
(1956) now, so his discussion in one of the vin-
tage pieces is quite welcome.

Some of the talks are unexpectedly technical
and business-oriented too, revealing just how
smart Corman really is. in particular, a 1970
American Film Institute seminar with the film-
maker features some insightful comments on
how studio productions can cost double what he
can do working by himself, and how he navigates
certain union rules to keep costs down. Likewise,
a 1 964 interview, conducted while Corman was
working on his Poe cycle, shows how deeply
these films are tied to Freud’s theories, with the
director displaying a very comprehensive grasp
of just what it is that makes horror work.

As Gorman’s legend has come increasingly into
focus in the last decade, more serious discussion

of his work is needed. There’s no question that
Roger Corman: Interviews is one of the better
books on the director, benefiting from multiple
viewpoints and fascinating details that may sur-
prise readers who have not come across these
early conversations before.

PAUL CORUPE

FRIGHT NIGHT ON CHANNEL 9

James Arena
McFarland

pretty astute historian,
as evidenced by his de-
tailed chrohicling of
prolific Z-movie pro-
ducer and horror comic
writer Sam Sherman
(Brain of Blood and
Oracula vs. Franken-
stein, both 1971),
whose works were fre-
quently programmed
on the network. Be-
sides, he gives props to Werewolf of Washington,
so I’d buy him a round just on principle.

Fright Night on Channel ffs appeal is admit-
tedly limited, but it’s a very solid effort and hence
recommended. Because let’s face it - we’re
kinda funny that way, aren’t we?

JOHN W. BOWEN

JOE GOLEM ANO THE OROWNING CITY

Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden

St. Martin's Press

Imagine that half of New York City sank into the
ocean back in 1 925 but people continued to live
in the buildings that were tall enough to poke out
of the water, constructing elaborate rope bridges
and walkways between them. Now, imagine that
these people - cut off from the rest of the city
and the world - formed their own society, creat-
ing a post-apocalyptic, steampunk-esque ghetto
out of the debris and whatever valuables they
could scavenge from the ruins.

This is the alternate history
into which we are cast for
Hellboy creator Mike Mignola
and author Christopher
Golden's latest illustrated
novel, Joe Golem and The
Drowning City. (The pair pre-
viously collaborated on 2007’s
unrelated Baltimore, or The
Steadfast Tin Soldier and the
Vampire, see /?M#70). And the
setting is far from the only un-
usual thing in the story, which
tells the tale of fourteen-year-
old Molly, an orphan whose life
is thrown into danger and dis-
array after the magician/medium she works for
is kidnapped by a pack of wetsuit clad, gas-
mask-wearing, not-quite-corporeal entities. But
before they can snag her too, she’s rescued by
Joe, who is the muscle for an evil-fighting, half-

We may not be as bad as Trekkies - perish the
thought! - but let’s not kid ourselves. The more
avid the horror fan, the nerdier the pursuits get,
sometimes reaching borderline pathological lev-
els. Countless volumes of fan fiction, entire rooms
devoted to collectibles (usually purchased for in-
sane sums at fan conventions), that Dawn of the
Dead box set you bought because it comes with
one extra feature your previous four didn’t include
- well, guilty as charged, aren’t you?

This all goes a long way toward explaining the
continued publication of books such as Fright
Night on Channel 9, in which freelance horror
scribe James Arena chronicles every film that
played on WOR-TV’s late-night horror show be-
tween 1973 and 1987. Unlike many of its peers,
the New York television network didn’t launch a
campy horror host to fame or even to local
celebrity status, but that doesn’t bother Arena,
because these were the films that sent him into
an irreversible nerd spiral, and his knowledge of
the territory is consider-
able. He’s meticulously
catalogued the broad-
cast schedule for the
years in question, even
including notation of
nights the show was
pre-empted, which
could prove impressive
or tortuous or some
combination thereof, de-
pending on one’s point
of view.

What’s beyond dis-
pute is his critical skill;
this guy is in love with
the genre but isn’t afraid
to call bullshit when necessary, citing Honeymoon
of Horror (1965) as an absolutely wretched film
that will likely appeal only to fans of high camp,
and dismissing The Mind of Mr. Soames (1970)
for botching an intriguing concept. He’s also a

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REVENGE

Gabrielie Faust
and Solomon Schneider
Barking Rain Press
This clever and ambitious novel, co-
written by Gabrielie Faust and
Solomon Schneider, follows Marcus
Glenfield who, after committing sui-
cide takes a grunt’s position in Hell,
harvesting souls for Lucifer as the Demon of Regret.
Driven by an intricate and political plotline involving Mar-
cus, his ex-girlfriend and a demonic love triangle, this
novel is not a terrifying read but an inebriating descriptive
journey into the nether regions of dark fantasy. Addictive
as, er, hell.

JESSA SOBCZUK

MQNSTERMATT'S BAD
MONSTER JOKES VOLUME 1

MonsterMatt Patterson
West Neb Books

Remember that punny uncle (pun-
cle?) who told bad jokes and pre-
tended to pull a quarter from behind
your ear? Imagine he compiled 400
of his worst, painfully reverse-engi-
neered horrorcentric groaners into one deplorably silly di-
gest. You'll be shxked at how tempting it is to see just
how low MonsterMatt will go. Quick: what actor is a zom-
bie favourite? Rot-ger Hauer! Oh, the inhumanity. . .

TREVOR TUMINSKI

JESSA SOBCZUK

iDAVIDSFaRia BLQODTHIRST IN BABYLON
David Scans
Samhain Publishing
Seasoned journalist David Searls
4n|||Hy|||gH| unleashes his fangs on his' second

55 ^^ ^o\ie\,Bloodthirst in Babylon, ami-
QLOODTiitKsf so-sparkly vampire tale set in the
“'!3.\BYLor) not-so-distant future. During the
M Great Recession, the town of Baby-
lon, with its promise of steady work and low rent sounds
like a safe haven for the downtrodden, but this false oasis
is actually crawling with bloodthirsty vamps conspiring to
prey on weary travellers. Intelligent and frightening, Seaiis
delivers a satiating Salem’s Lof-style page-turner.

mechanical old man. The pair are able to confirm that her boss, Felix, was kidnapped by a
mad scientist with apocalyptic intentions, and she agrees to join forces with them to stop him
and get Felix back. What comes next is a veritable roller-coaster of science-gone-wrong atroc-
ities, cannibalistic trees, inter-dimensional intrigue, wholesale urban destruction and tentacles.

Joe Golem and The Drowning City \s every bit as pulpy as it sounds, and its combination of
action-packed narrative, easily accessible language and teenage heroine make it feel very
much like a youhg adult novel - not that that's a bad thing or any reason to avoid this book.
Good stories are universal in their appeal and the creativity on display here will no doubt win
over monster fans of all ages, as will the dozens of black and white illustrations Mignola con-
tributed to the book.

Just be warned: once you are done reading, you won’t want to leave The Drowning City.
Good thing, then, that the book leaves the door open for a potential sequel, though you'll likely
agree it couldn’t come soon enough.

MONICA S. KUEBLER

32 FANGS

David Wellington
Crown Publishing Group

David Wellington has devoted a lot of time to making bloodsuckers the scary undead mothers
they are supposed to he with his recent cycle of vampire novels, which began with the web-
serialized (and later published in print) 73 Bullets in 2006, and continued with 99 Coffins, Vam-
pire Zero and 23 Hours, and concludes this month with 32 Fangs.

Throughout the novels, the reader follows state trooper-turned-monster hunter Laura Caxton
as she fights vampires and struggles to maintain a grasp of her own humanity through repeated
confrontations with the savage, unrelenting creatures. So it may come as a surprise to followers
of the series that Laura is by no means the central focus of this new book. First, we follow her
jilted lover Clara Hsu as she searches for clues to the whereabouts of her ex and the vampire

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. fiON MCKENZIE

I N THE ALL-TOO-NEAR FUTURE: THE WORLD HAS FINALLY FELT
THE KNOCKOUT PUNCH OF ECONOMIC MELTDOWN. IN ORDER TO
STAVE OFF TOTAL COLLAPSE, THE ENTIRE GLOBE’S MONETARY
DEALINGS ARE NOW OVERSEEN BY A MYSTERIOUS FINANCIAL
CABAL KNOWN AS “THE BANK.” Against this backdrop, Detective
Inspector Cass Jones (a good cop with very bad habits) is on the trail
of a serial killer called The Man of Flies while also trying to solve the mur-
der/suicide of his brother's family. Jones soon finds himself embroiled in
a conspiracy involving The Bank, mephistophelean
■wer brokers and his own checkered past. This is
the World of The Dog-Faced Gods, a gritty, super-
natural police pjocedural trilogy from UK author
Sarah Pinhorough, which began with 201 0's A Mat-
ter- of Blood and 201 1 's The Shadow of the Soul,
and wraps up with the recent release of The Cho-
sen Seed(Gollancz Books).

“I really wanted to take the story of Milton’s Par-
adise Lost and play with it," she explains of the
third and final book. “I also wanted to tie in the fi-
, nancial mess that the world was in and write some-
thing very dystopian, but with real crime
— sensibilities.”

Since her 2004 debut novel The Hidden, Pinbor-
ough’s name has been a consistent presence on
bookstore shelves. It's no small feat considering
she initially juggled writing and a full-time position
as a teacher - a rigorous schedule that she says
required a lot of discipline.

"it’s very hard to do a job as demanding as
teaching high school and knock out a novel every
nine months, which I did for my first five horror nov-
els," she says. “Now I write more over a year, obviously,. ..but I still look
back and think those were the toughest days.”

in the past tweive months alone, Pinhorough has written a second tie-
in novei to the BBC series Torchwood, the final novel of her YA.trilogy The
Nowhere Chronicles (under the pseudonym Sarah Silverwood), an episode
~ of BBC crime drama New Tricks and a shorf story tif led “The Screaming
Room" for lasf year’s The Monster’s Comer: Stories Through Inhuman
Eyes anthology. While she cites influences ranging from Stephen King to
■ ■ author/playwright Daphne Du Maurier (“The Birds"), pivotal to The Dog-

Faced Gods was the work of an Irish author whose short story “The New
Daughter" was adapted into an underrated Kevin Costner film of the same
name (RMftWS).

“I’d have to say that John Connolly and his Charlie Parker novels were
a massive inspiration," states Pinhorough. “Until I’d read those and
Michael Marshall Smith’s The Intruders, I hadn’t thought that you could
really cross the weird with mainstream crime fiction."

In The Chosen Seed, readers finally have all the pieces to the puzzle
Pinhorough has been assembling over the past
three years, as Cass is framed for a murder he
didn’t commit and the grimy gumshoe reaches
endgame with The Bank. Nofsurprisingly, there
are plans to bring the tale to the small screen,
and thanks to one of her biggest tans, an -Amer-
ican publication of the trilogy from Penguin is in
the works (“I think it’s coming out in the States
as The Forgotten Gods," Pinhorough. notes).

“I owe a debt of gratitude to F. Paul Wilson [The
Keep, the Repairman Jack novels],” says Pinbor-
ough. “He’d read the books and emailed [Pen-
guin] to say that they really needed to look at
[The Dog-Faced Gods] again, and they then went _
on to buy the trilogy.”

Fittingly, one of her many pro]ects in develop-
ment is a collaboration with Wilson (“I can’t say
too much about it, other than it’s a novella and
pretty gritty and dark,” she allows), in addition to
a two-part story scheduled for 201 3.

"Mayhem and Murder are a duology - V^s, aodJB
parently that is a word - set in late 1 9th-cenWry^^
London against the backdrop of the Jack the Rip-
per investigation," she explains. “Whereas The Dog-Faced Gods are crime
novels with a supernatural background, this is a spectral story with a
crime subplot. It's a huge amount of work because I’ve used people who
really existed as my main characters, and they’re investigating a real
crime, which was never solved. I’ve just put my own 'What if?’ on it all.'’

With such a variety of real-life and supernatural scares intersecting in
her work, just what gives Pinhorough the willies?

“Everything scares meT’she exclaims. “I think what I probably try to exor-
cise is fear itself - thaf’s never going to happen, but I’ll keep trying!" 5

WOKEN

The Dog-Feaed BMe ^

BOOKTRABM

Justina Malvern. When she eventually tracks them down, It culminates In a battle Involving
the state troopers, witches, a guy with a tree for an arm and a SWAT team - helicopter
and all.

This book also finally gives us the notorious back story
of the series’ villain, Justina. Turns out, she was already
pretty evil during her human life. She not only got her
dad to kill his brother on some hopped-up molestation
charges, but she later whored out her own mother - all
before meeting the vampire Vincombe, who completed
her transformation into an unstoppable undead so-
ciopath.

The richness of this tale lies in its flashbacks, where
Wellington reveals all the moves Justina made in the
previous novels to avoid termination by Laura and how
all these pieces fit together. For the loyal reader, this is
the blood-red cherry on top of the immortal sundae.

It should come as no shock that the final showdown
is between nemeses Laura and Justina, but the body
count is so high that you may find yourself quesfioning
the point at which the end stops justifying the means. That said, if you prefer your vampires
to be truly monstrous and the carnage to be gory and over-the-top, you won’t be disap-
pointed with how Wellington wraps up his five-book yarn. Absolutely blistering.

BRENTONBENTZ

THE FLAME ALPHABET i

Ben Marcus
Alfred A. Knopf

Need proof that children are evil incarnate? Then look no further than The Flame Alpha- '
bet, an unusual story from avant-garde writer Ben Marcus that depicts a dystopian society 1
where the language and voices of children are physically debilitative to adults. |

Set in a small Jewish community in the suburbs, narrator Samuel and his wife Claire ,
have discovered the root of their failing health is related to their teenage daughter Esther. 1
The mean-spirited girl, realizing her power, goes out of her way to drain the life from her j
parents as prolonged exposure to her vocal presence renders them increasingly gaunt, j
frail and unable to function. In her absence the couple begins to rebound, but they can’t ]
bring themselves to be separate from Kid Kryptonite. »
Samuel desperately employs myriad electronic de- >
vices, seeks answers in pirate radio broadcasts and '
vaguely religious secret societies, and concocts 1
home remedies - anything that might slow the ef- |
fects of Esther's poisonous speech on himself and :
Claire, who is fast deteriorating. With the child-driven r
threat reaching epidemic proportions, Samuel sets
out to create a new language that won’t sicken those ;
who hear it.

Given such a promising, nightmarish premise, it's
disappointing that The Flame Alphabets synthesis ol
body horror and the “bad seed” subgenre Is ham-
pered by the dizzying amount of detail Marcus in- ^
eludes, effectively rendering the ominous storyline f
somewhat obtuse. Add to it the slug-like pace at
which the guts of the story are rationed out and the inability to discern what information
in a given chapter, if any, is vital to the plot, and you’re left with an intriguing but frustrating
read.

Yet it’s not hard to imagine that a stripped-down version of this novel could make a ■;
glass-si ipper fit for David Cronenberg to adapt into a film. Not unlike William S. Burroughs’ ■
The Naked Lunch - as difficult a text as any, and one which Cronenberg successfully -■
brought to the screen in 1991 - The Flame Alphabet runneth over with similarly arcane ?
biological and technological language that is, if nothing else, endlessly inventive and ,
uniquely descriptive. Should he straighten out, Marcus has the potential to be an important
voice in whatever genre he chooses. For now, there’s a crippling irony in a story about the /
toxicity of language that’s ultimately less readable due to being excessively intellectual. ^

TREVOR TUMINSKI .'

I t'S been years since I’ve had to actively seek out horror
fiction - save for the rare tomes I wish to acquire for
my library. It finds me, from the mounds of books that
cross my desk here at Rue Morgue \o the unpublished pieces
that appear in my small press’ inbox. While working on my
own web serial, I recently discovered the robust reading/writ-
ing community that thrives online. And I’m not talking about
the professionals, but rather the sites that beckon to the yet-
to-be-discovered and those who want to tell stories more for
fun and feedback than for profit (yes, they really exist). Not
that everything warehoused in these places is brilliant, but
just like watching no-budget films, there are rewards for
those who have the inclination to search out the gems. Let’s
take a look at four such destinations and what they offer the
horror fan.

Wattpad.com

Heavily populated by teens and young adults, genre is a
prominent fixture here in all its forms. The site’s message
boards not only include forums for horror and fantasy, but
also more specifically for vampires and werewolves. The
community-driven voting/reads system makes finding quality
tales less of a slog and the nifty mobile/tablet app is perfect
for reading on the go.

Scribd.com

More a file-sharing site than a writing community. Horror does
not get its own category, meaning stories are split across
"Science Fiction & Fantasy,” ’’Thrillers” and "Young Adult.”
Using the site search for “horror" is not particularly helpful
either as it only retrieves works that feature the word in the
title, not in the tags. One plus: a lot of publishers such as Ran-
dom House excerpt their new releases here, so it’s a decent
place for sampling, if not consuming wholly.

Authonomy.com

This HarperCollins-branded site is more about critiquing and
prepping books for submission than reading for pleasure,
though the works that appear on it tend to be more polished as
a result. Horror has its own category, but many of the tales in it
cross-pollinate with other genres. If you like the idea of helping
to shape stories, this could be a good fit for you, though the writ-
ers constantly begging for reads/backing can get annoying.

Figment.com

Founded by an editor and a writer from The New Yorker, Fig-
ment recently swallowed up YA fiction/critiquing site
lnkpop.com and is a cross between Wattpad and Authonomy.
Horror is well-represented and the site uses a rating system
similar to that of Wattpad (hearts/comments) to direct you to
more polished stories. Figment utilizes user-created groups
for its community, and searching for "horror” dredges up
roughly 25 of them dedicated to various topics.

Not sure where to begin? My favourite is Wattpad, as it’s fun,
rewarding and easy-to-use for readers and writers alike, and
the ability to subscribe to and download your favourite tales
to your mobile device for quick access is a huge perk. And
who knows, you might just discover the next Stephen King
before anyone else does!

MONICA S. KUEBLER

51 3 '

T oronto's Chris Roberts ISHQ STRANGER TO THESE PAGES. We ran his TwUghtZone
piece, Terror At 20,000 Feet, for our Richard Matheson retrospective (RM#35)
and a collage of Vincent Price portraits called Vincent Price Is Right for our art
feature celebrating 100 years of Vincent Price (RMff1 1 1). Needless to say, we’re
big fans, but he also may just be Canada's best-kept secret when it comes to
horror art.

By day, Roberts works at a print shop, creating graphics and illus-
trations for various film and television productions, most recently work-
ing witti prop departments on Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim and the
upcoming Total Recail remake. By night, he can be found working away
in his art lab, stitching together his love of art history and classic horror.

“I had done traditional monster portraits in the past and was looking
for a fresh approach," explains Roberts of his idea to mix monsters
with classicai works of art. ‘‘The first mash-up painting was a commis-
sioned piece and the response was so enthusiastic, it developed into a
whole series."

Mis work is similar in theme to lowbrow artist Isabel Samaras, who's
become known for placing classic monsters within classical painting
settings, such as her Black Venus, which puts the Bride of Frankenstein
in the familiar context of Sandro Botticelli's The Birth Of Venus. Roberts, however, takes
the concept to a new level, while adding a healthy dose of black humour. His spoof of
Death Of Marat (by French painter Jacques-Louis David), for example, is re-imagined
as Death Of A Gillman (pictured) and portrays the Creature instead of assassinated rev-
olutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat lying limp in the bath. Both Marat and the Creature
are seen as tragic figures and the parallels are comical but poignant. Perhaps the Crea-
ture was as much the victim of Kay Lawrence (Julie Adams), as was Marat of his real-
iife murderer Charlotte Corday.

Similarly, Roberts’ take on Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque de-
picts the Bride of Frankenstein naked, save for stitches, and surrounded by lab equip-
ment. She is no doubt a concubine for the Monster.

Perhaps Roberts’ most memorable piece, though, is his brilliant riff on Leonardo da
Vinci's The Last Supper (above). In it, Jesus and his twelve disciples have been replaced
by Universal’s roster of infamous ghouls.

“I started with Frankenstein as Jesus because he rose from the
dead, Judas became Mr. Hyde because he’s a two-faced jerk, and the
two figures on either end of the table, with their long flowing capes,
could only become Dracula and the Phantom," says Roberts of his take
on the famous painting. “The others were mostly dictated by the poses
of the figures; for example, the robes of one disciple suggested the
bandages of the Mummy."

Close inspection reveals other ingenious touches, including the fact
that the invisible Man has no feet under the table. And, if there’s any
question that Roberts is a man of detail, one need only look at his
sculptures. Working with plaster, he’s created one-of-a-kind mini-busts
of diverse creatures such as the Gillman, Ray Harryhausen’s cyclops
and an intricate Norris head from John Carpenter's The Thing.

Roberts says he takes inspiration from an exceptionally diverse roster of artists, in-
cluding classical painters Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Magritte, as well as more modern
masters such as H.R. Giger, comic book iliustrators Richard Corben and Bemie Wright-
son, and Aurora model box art illustrator James Bama. So then, what’s next?

“I’ve been thinking of Dali’s The Persistence Of Memory as a possibility," notes Roberts
of his next challenge.

To get one of the artist’s works for yourself, visit etsy.com/shop/Monsterbatory-
World.e

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hemica! Bum Entertainment distributes a va-
riety of low-budget independent films. So
let’s have a look at a trio of titles from the
Horror & Gore section of their catalogue.

The company’s latest release is a British film
called Bane, written, directed and produced by
James Eaves. The plot draws heavily from '00s tor-
ture porn, namely Saw (2004), Hostel (2005), The
Descent (2005) and Martyrs (200S). Four women are
brought into a cinder-block room by a phalanx of
men in hazmat suits who inject them with a drug
that renders them unconscious. They wake up on
army cots in a cell consisting of electrified industrial
fencing draped in translucent plastic sheeting, with
no memory of who they are or why they're there. By
day. they’re hooked up to
electrodes while psychologi-
' cally tortured by the sadistic

Dr. Murdoch. By night, they’re

‘ ^ , visited one at a time by The

. Surgeon, an enigma in blood-
f jtz spattered surgical garb who

'•"“TZL..,. carves numbers into ^eir tor-
jH| SOS - the time at which he

will return to kill them. Mean-
while, a nightmarish creature
with a face of flailing tenta-
cles lurks within the complex. The Final Girl escapes
her cell and discovers the real reason for these ex-
periments.

Bane plods well-trodden ground, but there’s an
earnestness and sense of craft that runs through the
production, from the performances to the hi-def cin-
ematography, score and minimalist production de-
sign. A pair of entertaining third act
twists take the story in a new, albeit
clumsy, direction, and the whole thing f frfji
is punctuated by a lot of blood and
gore gags that include gashing, slash-
ing, exploding eyeballs and a well-de- ^

served cranial crush. ^

Breaking Glass recently released , ,
Crowbar (a.k.a. Crowbar: The Killings
Of Wendeil Graves), a film that ^
writer/director Scott Phillips states, in — *

one of the extras, has a horror side
and an art house side that he feels makes it unique.
In truth, it’s really just a pretty slasher. In the opening
scene, a young boy witnesses his parents being

what undermine it. Starting with a scene that could
have been a jaw-dropper, an enraged man ties a
woman upside down between two trees while railing
on about her sleeping with someone

else. He slits open the crotch of her

jeans, rams a funnel into her vagina,

cWTrl fjiijpg innards with drain cleaner.

The police then find her right side
T ‘s shown

to grant the scene any impact. But it
does get better.

/ ^ detectives find themselves on

r trail of a serial killer who is re-

(•■".1) C'- j ‘ acting violently to everyday aggra-
vations. As the murders continue, the
social faux pas that prompt them become ever
slighter while the killings become more vicious. A
bum is flayed alive for attempting to rob the maniac,
and he has fun with a couple, who cut him off on the
highway while engaging in oral sex, by shoving the
man’s severed penis down her throat and lopping
off her head. The latter scene would have been
much more disturbing if the effects were not so
cheap and rudimentary. The focus of the film,
though, is the investigation and the troubled per-
sonal lives of the two cops, which culminates in an
admittedly nifty twist ending.

If these titles sound like your kind of gory low-
budget fun, visit chemicalbum.org for the company’s
complete catalogue.

murdered in their home by a maniac clad in a blood-
soaked apron and a welding helmet. After the title se-
quence, a young couple, Alex (Michael Ray Park) and
Ronnie (Natasha Timpani), move into the

house. That night, while Alex is at work, •

Ronnie has a housewarming party with
her two best friends, who are promptly
slaughtered by the same masked ma- '

rauder. The following day, Alex and Ron- i.

nie look up the history of the house and
learn that the boy who survived has
vowed to exact revenge on anyone who amS ■ ^
violates his parents’ home again. Their j

investigation leads to an inevitable con- J

frontation with the killer.

The film is a mash-up of Halloween

^ and Psycho, from plot points to musical

|> A 1^ cues. The score is unusual for a film of
w^f W this budget though, comprised primarily
of haunting classical piano and small-
ensemble chamber music. Perform-
ances from the supporting cast are
decidedly quirky and sinister, and the
signature crowbar killings bookending
IP the film are appropriately juicy, includ-
ing a few caved-in foreheads and vari-
ous impalings.

Rounding out our trio is Charles Petersen’s The
Eieventh Aggression -V\e one that definitely goes for
the nasty here, but a lack of bucks and balls some-

3 54

omorgue

flNNER|Ce
ARBOWVIOEa^ t

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THE WOMAN IN BLACK

Marco Beltrami
Silva Screen

Marco Beltrami has written some of his
finest woi1< for the various horror re-
makes he’s scored {The Omen, The
Thin^, and The Woman in Black is
again composed in a style that hear-
kens back to the rich orchestral scores
of the late 70s. He's not quite chan-
nelling vintage John Williams, but his
use of melody is paramount to captur-
ing the unease of characters con-
fronted by myths, legends, ghosts and
tactile nightmares. Heavy with strings
and woodwinds, there’s botfi charm
and dread in the way Beltrami’s main
theme never seems to settle into one
staid mood, as in the mercurial "Bills
Past Due. ’’The orchestrations are razor
sharp, and the dissonant build-ups are
often more frightening than the punc-
tuating stabs. Beltrami also makes pe-
riodic use of an affecting chorus and
more abstract motifs that easily recall
his abrasively beautiful music for
Scream, but the frequent recurrence of
his tender theme makes Woman one of
his most compelling works.

MRH

THE LOST SKELETON SOUNUntACK
RETURNS AGAIN

John Morgan

and William Stromberg

Creature Features

As he did with his prior film, The Lost
Skeleton of Cadavra, auteur Larry
Biamire chose to work with pre-exist-
ing music for the sequel, but instead of
vintage stock music cues, he opted for
disparate orchestral and synth music

originally composed by John Morgan
and William Stromberg for a series of
anti-nuke documentaries and short
films. The composing duo is best
known for two things; meticulous film
score restorations (Mysterious /s/and)
and sophisticated orchestral scores for
very modest budgets - and Returns
could be regarded as a score Bernard
Herrmann may have written if he
needed to make rent in 1 957. The com-
positional skills are top notch, with
moods ranging from dramatic to broad
action-adventure: several highlights
ring of genre favourites such as Sisters
and tt'sMve. Still, the assembled suites
of uncut cues (some previously unre-
leased) generally flow well, creating a
weird, exotic journey that’s trashy and
fun, and a good sampling of the com-
posers' adeptness. MRH

:i«/C),ULD

' W '

UNDERWORLD:

AWAKENING

Paul Hasiinger

Ukeshore

Having scored the original Underworld
and its unnecessary 2009 prequel, Paul
Hasiinger returns for the fourth Install-
ment in the franchise with his signature
blend of electronics and orchestra, giv-
ing the film a sleek sheen of fluid
sounds and punchy rhythms fraceable
back to his days with Tangerine Dream.
Much of the score is an ongoing con-
trast between sombre atmospheres
and precisely timed orchestral erup-
tions, which makes for a really en-
grossing narrative. The brooding "This
Is Not One of Us" is a prime example of
Haslinger's knack for thick electronic
chords and little gestures (a dark piano
phrase is often paired with the absorb-
ing chord progressions), while more ki-
netic cues are propelled by fat analog
pulses and rattling percussion samples.
"Prepare the Armory" brings back the
full orchestra to complete the score’s
gothic design, but there’s also much
beauty in Haslinger’s use of grungy gui-
tar licks and distortion. MRH

Camp" "Colony Coilapse” and "Corpo-
rate Elect," and simmering potions "In
Cythera” and “On All Hallow’s Eve."
Where most bands weaken with age,
Killing Joke’s songwritirg scythe only
seems to get sharper. Come December
23, we may all be ash but these
geezers certainly aren’t going quietly.
TT

KILLING JOKE

MMXII

SPINErAHM/UmVERSAL
Considering most of Killing Joke fled to
Iceland in paranoid anticipation of the
Apocalypse in the early ’80s, to observe
radio silence in a year txasting the omi-
nous end of the Mayan calendar
would’ve seemed a terrible oversight.
Luckily, the influential coven has
marked the occasion with its fifteenth
studio album, W/WX//(2012 in Roman
numerals), which hears them balancing
the more refined, melodic approach
they adopted in the mid-’80s and revis-
ited on 201 0’s Absolute Dissent, with
the cumulative and terrifying power of
the elemental heaviness the group has
accrued over the last 30-plus years.
Blade Runner-esnue synth pads bolster
the band’s trademark primitive aggres-
sion, exploding choruses and Jaz Cole-
man’s instantly recognizable rallying
roar on dance floor grinder "Rapture,"
political spo(dings such as “Fema

LVCIFYRE

The Calling Depths

Pulverised

If Cthuhiu is looking for the ideal en-
trance music to mai1< his rise from
slumbering in the deep, he need look
no further than the title track of this
monstrosity. The debut full-length from
British trio Lvcifyre is a wonderfully ter-
rifying mass of slithering tempos and
brooding, blackened riffs that are defi-
nitely not for the faint of metal heart.
Fans of Immolation, Incantation and
early Morbid Angel will find much to
like, but this is not some old-school
throwback. Dollops of Behemoth and

HyfnnOTHOUOOi^tlORRORilll

SHE'S STILL DEAD m SHE'SsmW.

Immortal, Eternal ^

Indepemdent . ' .

Ruffian creeps She’s Still Dead rampage onto the - ■

horror scene by way of New Orleans with //nmof- f* 5^"

tal, Eternal, an eleven-track refresher course in lo- • 3

fi punk/thrash, produced by ex-White Zombie

guitarist J. Yuenger. With a sound somewhere be-

tween Black Flag and (early) NOFX, this is not a

game-changing genre-bender, but what SSD lack in inventiveness, they make up
for with frenetic, unadulterated passion. Cos Solo's vocals only range from al-
most-screaming to screaming, but shouting about ripping up throats and unveiling
organs. before eating them is already halfway to awesome. Lyrically, Solo’s re-
morseless. tongue-in-cheek contempt for both the living and the dead is ttre per-
fect foil for the band's rigid rock-outs, while added screechy guitar noises and
metal-esque solos bring depth to the otherwise straight-ahead arrangements.
Headbanging is on high with several notable tunes, namely “Hands of the Ripper."
_ “Pedal lo the Devil" and "We Won’t Stop When the Screaming Starts." Perfect
music for cruising in your hearse or prepping your next autopsy. JS i

ODWNLOtD 1VIS ISSUE'S mWWGK AT RUE-M0R6UE.G0MIHVMNS

AUDIO DUQIAI '

IDe D E V I L‘S

PLWMST

othing impresses me more than dogged determination, and Ryan
Graveface has demonstrated he may well be the poster boy for
- - the stuff. The sole membfer of deceptively dark shoegazer act

Dreamend, Graveface may be most familiar to RM readers as the
bassist/guitarist in experimental psych-poppers Black Moth Super Rain-
bow (who contributed the song “Born on a Day the Sun Didn’t Rise’.’ to
our first tfymns compilation). With his latest release, however, he is •liter-
ally and figuratively on his own.

And the Tears Washed Me, Wave After Cowardly Wave is the second
part to a story the singer/multi-instrumentalist began telling on 201 0’s
So I Ate Myself, Bite By Bite (both via his own Graveface Records label).
Based upon a real-life serial killer’s journal, which Graveface claims to
have purchased “years ago at an auction in the woods,” the first record
traced the killer’s life from childhood to his thirties, while the second cov-
ers his first taste for blood until death. Ob-
sessed with cemeteries, roadside America
and oddities since he was a kid, Graveface
admits it was the unsettling parallels that
he gradually deduced between his life and
that of the diary’s author - whom he only
divulges is “not one of the famous dudes”
- which compelled him to set it to music.

“What I thought was amazing about the
journal is how normal he was, you know,
outside of the whole murder thing,” says Graveface. "He wrote about
common family issues, girl trouble, job struggles, and his take on all of
it was eerily similar to mine. Realizing I could relate to a serial killer
wasn’t exactly a happy moment for me.”

Unfortunately, it was only one of many instances to take the wind out
of Graveface’s ostensibly cursed sails. Following the release of So I Ate
Myself. . . , he lost two close loved ones, had a ton of stock destroyed in
a flood, became embroiled in a lawsuit with a former distributor and re-
located to Savannah, Georgia, from Chicago, only to have numerous pos-
sessions - including a cello, a banjo, a bell set, an organ and his vocal
mic - irreparably damaged in the move.

When most would've packed it in, Graveface took three weeks to
record And the Tears Washed Me. . .with his instruments in as-is condi-
tion. “I guess I don’t know when to quit. It’s like the musical version of
Final Destination,” he jokes.

Rguring he was arguably just as bro-
ken as the instruments, he soldiered on
and crafted a meticulously layered curio
of morbidly sweet (“God Went Out of
Me"), wonderfully warbiy ("The Sick Call
Cabinet’') and refreshingly fragile (“Cold
and Dead”) psychedelic folk-pop. Listen
closely to hear him even shaking his
anxiety pill bottles as percussion on
“Your Apparition Stays with Me Still."

Such resolve in the face of adversity
is a testament to the inner strength of Graveface, who’s definitely a bit
of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Self-deprecating and shy, yet prolific and
hard-working, his dichotomous personality is reflective of his music’s
equally confounding balance of dark subject matter and almost childlike
cheer.

"I can’t justify writing ‘pop’ songs unless there’s something gruesome
underneath,” he affirms.

So mote it be.

: ru:

R M

sptngio iHMi

Nile influences scattered throughout
keep things thoroughly relevant. The
album is perfectly bookended by the dy-
namic title track and the closer “The
Great Fall,” which opens with a tolling
church bell and builds through ominous
power chords to a grandiose biastfest
of epic technical riffage and eerie leads.
Between those, there is much to unset-
tle your subconscious in songs such as
“The Faceless One," “Holy Chaos” and
“Death’s Magnetic Sleep.” GM

VENOM

Fallen Angels

Universal

Venom is like the evil AC/DC in that the
long-running band sticks to a consis-
tent sound and theme. The blackened
British metal veterans find as many
ways to have lyrical discourse with the
Devil as the horny Aussie rockers have
ways of making ttiinly veiled metaphors
for sex. Fallen Angels stays the course,
with chugging, snarling 'tude-filled
tunes such as "Sin,” “Hail Satanas” and
"Death Be Thine Name" keeping the
group’s proto-thrash stomp intact. The
short, acoustic “Lest We Forget" and
the seven-minute-long title track mix
things up a bit, but we’re in It for the
songs that turn hands into horns and
set heads a-bangin’. “Punk’s Not Dead”
and “Pedal to the Metal” suffice, but
neither come close to the searing
riffage of "Antechrist" or "Rege Sa-
tanas,” from the band's underrated last
album, 2006's Meta! Black. Could that
be why Fallen Angels was just kinda
dumped without much warning? Hell
only knows. DA

THE ROHED metai

Ad Nauseam

CaNDLELIGH]

Having emerged from the cult tongue-
in-cheek Brit death outfit Gorerotted
back in 2008. The Rotted came up

aces on its Get Dead or Die Trying
debut that year, a frantic amalgama-
tion of breakneck thrash, crust and
grinding death with a sense of lyrical
black humour. Just as Intense and
memorable, Ad Nauseam ups the
ante with blistering songwriting that
blows away the competition. Most im-
pressive is the band's ability to bal-
ance fast and furious riffing with Ben
McGrow’s vocal attack, a style char-
acterized by epic, shout-along pat-
terns. Anthems of death, disease and
destruction, such as “Apathy in the
UK,” “Surrounded by Skulls,” “Just
Add Nauseam" and "Entering the
Arena of the Unwell,” find the band’s
cheeky sense of macabre wit alive
and well. Whether blasting away
against skull-splitting D-beats or
searing down tooth enamel with
gritty-as-fuck death diatribes, The
Rotted has successfully avoided the
dreaded sophomore slump with ruth-
less aggression and filthy musical
abandon. GP

CRYPTICUS/SCAREMAKER meial

Split CD
Selfmadegod

Two horror metal bands from the Ra-
zorback Records family unite on this
satisfyingly gruesome splatter split.
Opening with the ominous “It. ..is...
later... than... you... think" intro from
classic ghost story radio program
Lights Out, Crypticus kicks things off
with four tracks of straight-ahead
headbangin' gore ditties. Known for its
bizarre death grind and lyrics devoted
to H.P. Lovecraft, Crypticus sounds a
little more conventional here than
usual, but its no-holds-barred take on
death metal, thrash and hardcore
makes for a non-stop roller-coaster of
fun, regardless. Next up is Scaremaker,
which wasn’t particularly impressive
on its 201 0 Razorback debut but deliv-
ers four tacks of pleasantly punishing
doom-drenched, old-school death
metal about movies such as Burnt Of-
ferings, Madman and '80s cheesefest
Trick or Treat There’s absolutely no
comparing Scaremaker's output here
with its previous efforts; it’s that much
better. Any way you slice it, this split
CD should satisfy your extreme metal
and VHS horror cravings. AVL

ILENfHlII

tdlltC-T

COLOR

NUMBERED. PIECES WITH AMAZING FULL

DANIEL LIGHT BALANCES AMBIENT
CREEP-OUTS AND HAIR-RAISING
CRESCENDOS EDR HIS SCORE TO

SILENT HILL: DOWNPOUR

iNCE 1939, EACH INSTALLMENT IN KONAMPS SUCCESSFUL

featured industrial scores and sound design by Akira Yamaoka, the
sonic brain who also created the surprisingly tender main theme for
the feature film version of Silent Hill. But after his departure from the
' company in 2009, thfrproducers needed someone who could main-

' ’tain continuity with the established musical design for an eighth installment,
Silent Hill: Downpour (iust released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360). Enter Daniel
>Licht, the American composer best known for scor-
J^ing seven seasons of TV's Dexter and feature films
^eluding Thinner, Hellraiser IV: Bloodlines and late
. entries in both the Children of the Corn and Ami-
tyville series.

' “The main elements that inspired me were the
dark, lonely, eerie and frightening landscapes," ex-
plains Licht of his debut video game treatment. “I
b'ied to make the music reflect the haunting feel of
Silent Hill and at the same time coax the player to
venture forth into the darkness."

The companion soundtrack (now available from
Milan Records) is comprised of nineteen pieces by
Licht and a theme simply titled “Silent Hill" by Korn
singer Jonathan Davis. From the opening track, fans
of Dexter may notice Licht's familiar use of piano,
percussion, soft vocals and guitar textures, but the
lengthy score also maintains a strong linktoYamaoka's tragic, deeply engmssing
theme as play^ venture into the game’s grungy bowels.

"Every level I used several types of music with other unique sounds," he ex-
plains, "1 start with ambient music, then graduate to an ostinato-based medium-
tempo vibe that builds and, finally, all hell breaks loose with battle."

One rhythmically charged track, “Clowning Around with Monsters." fixes a
flanging techno beat to low string figures, while a processed female cackle
evokes the same chill composers Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind achieved with
their creepy vocal effects for The Shining. Another, “Monastery Otherworld," fea-

tures a faint siren motif that recalls a bit of Goblin’s Suspiria. Among hrs arsenaf]
of gnashing sonics are processed clangs, banged rhythms, droning tones, re- 1
verberations and bass rumbles, yet each has little vestiges of the main theme,
This common thread, along with the inclusion of quasi-religious, delicate female
voices, helps to balance the colder, processed sounds and Inject small doses of
humanism into the horror.

“I think, in general, people forget that a lot of music written for horror is kind
of sad and bittersweet," he offers. “It's about loss of innocence, loss of a com-
panion, and [it’s these themes] that I’ve been work-
ing with in films forever."

Clearly, the composer believes scoring horror for
any medium is much more than writing simple
shock cues. Licht’s knack for introspection gives
Downpour a distinct sound, but there’s also a sly
sense of humour that worms its way up through the
gloominess.

"Having done comedy gives my music a unique
approach because I can do darker subjects, but with '
an ironic twist,” he explains. “1 think that's why I got
the job on Dexter- 1 do know how to ‘wink’ in the
music a little bit within a dark setting."

Because the Silent Hill games work on three dif-
ferent levels of horror (unseen, graphic and implied),
one might assume Licht relegated specific sounds
or motifs to reflect certain levels or mounting dan-
gers. But other than a particular choir element comprised of "very, very unpleas-
ant music, organized chaos, with voices from hell" - which he says he reserved
for the game’s alternate dimension, the "Otherworld," after receiving numerous
emails from fans - Licht explains that he treated each sequence with the express.,
purpose of serving the story.

“My approach to the scenes is universal to any project: ‘How can I use music
to help enhance the vision of the makers?’ Sometimes you want to do it quietly
so the viewer feels like they are voyeurs and sometimes you want to add to the
frenzy!"

T7?

ZOMBIES!!! MOBILE EDITION :

Windows 7 phone
Babaroga

Before undead board games went high-
profile witti competing Walking OeaJtitles
(RM#1 19}, there was Zombies!!! (from Twilight Creations Inc.), which re-envi-
sioned how table-top games functioned while creating a facsimile of a zombie
apocalypse using littie plastic 3-D rotters. With a game board constructed dur-
ing play - players add a new street or building tile and a random number of
zombies each turn - no two games are the same. A session can last from five
minutes to well over an hour (depending on how many expansion packs are
being used) and requires an element of strategy in placing tiles and zombies
to hinder opponents. Now, Zombies!!! \s going digital with software developer
Babaroga [Horror Master Trivia) creating a video game version of the cult title.

“We are huge fans of the board game and we really wanted to see it made
available to a wider audience," says Aaron Bauer, producer of Zombies!!! Mo-
biie Edition. “We managed to find a wonderful and willing partner in Twilight
Creations, so we dove right in. ... [They] provided us with their original artwork
to use for the cards, so we were able to really preserve the overall look and
feel of the game.”

Babaroga recognized the strengths and solid design of Zombies!!! immedi-
ately, so instead of changing the pacing or any of the core game mechanics,
the company focused on properly mimicking the original experience digitally
and developing a complementary system for single-player gaming - some-
thing that board games need not address.

"Zombies!!! Moblie Edition follows the same turn progression as the board
game,” explains Bauer. “It directly recreates the board game experience, using
simple touch controls. We have added multiple rule sets to allow for pre-gen-
erated towns, single-player survival, and more. The addition of achievements
and leaderboards adds to the experience as well."

And reminiscent of the plastic rotters that shuffled after your game pieces
in the table-top Zombies!!!, the mobile edition also embraces 3-D through its
cartoonish environments, which can be rotated and zoomed into from any di-
rection, allowing players to truly experience the tension of being surrounded

by flesh-eaters in an unfamiliar city.

“We have an excellent team of artists and animators who have really
brought the player pieces and zombies to life - or un-life, if you will,” notes
Bauer, who explains the team used classic zombie films as inspiration for the
game’s gritty menus. “The cinematic camera work also goes a long way to
drive the tone of the entire game. ... There is a certain amount of whimsy in
the board game that keeps it fun and tips its hat to zombie fans. We put a lot
of effort into maintaining that balance of both fun and horror themes.”

Though Zombies!!! Mobile Edition currently only contains content from the
.original board game, Babaroga is not ruling out adding additional material
'from the expansions, as well as a proper online muiti-player component (cur-
irently, playing with friends requires one device to be passed from person to
1 person). But clearly the company’s heart is in the right place. Bauer notes, "As
: avid fans of all things zombies and games, [this] just felt like something we
had to do,"

Zombies!!! Mobile Edition is available for Windows 7 phones now, with ver-
sions for other mobile platforms and Xbox Live slated to be released over the
course of the year. Visit babaroga.com for updates and release dates.

MONICA S.KUEBLER

RESroyg^EVI!

^ RESIDENT EVIL: REVELATIONS

R F V F 0 N S

Nintendo 3DS

Capcom

For your next vacation, you might want to

book passage on the SS Queen Zenobia. That's

the cruise ship where the latest installment of

CAPCDH*

the ffes/denffw/ franchise is set. And be sure

to enjoy the casino and play some shuffleboard
- when you’re not battling vicious crustaceans while waist-deep in bilge water.

Capcom has definitely upped the ante by putting out what may possibly be the
best-looking game available for the Nintendo 3DS platform. It's also the scariest title
to date, absolutely brimming with tense, suspenseful atmosphere.

9 f 9 9 1 I HEAOSHOTS: AMAZING GRAPHICS. EERIE SOUNDSCAPE, VERY SCARY
XXXX}^ \ MISF]RES;WEAKA.I.,CLUNKYCONTRDLS.SOMECHARACTERSAREANNOYING

Players take on the roles of RE alumni Jill Valentine and
Chris Redfield, who are exploring me ship, along with their ^ ,

respective (and completely useless) A.I. counterparts. T ft
Slowly inching down dark, labyrinthine corridors, you’ll
encounter a whole host of vicious creabjres, such as '

gigantic water cockroaches with razor-sharp teeth 5^ *
and an ominous new enemy called the Ooze, which ' '•

can melt its body and seep through narrow openings. \

Though the game still has a campy storyline, develop- t

ers have stripped away a lot of the bells and whistles , '
from previous outings to return to ttie series’ survival ’
horror roots. That means you’ll have to conserve your
ammunition once again and stay alert
Just be sure to grab a lifejacket and some green
herbs before setting a course for terror on the high
seas.

ANDREW LEE i

ANDREW LEE

THE DARKNESS II

PC/PS3/Xbox 360
2K Games/Digital Extremes

I -iust when Jackie Estacado thought he
i ^ sV i was out, The Darkness is pulling him back

^ r t I in. This sequel to 2007’s smash hit (based

I on the long-running Top Cow comic. book se-
ries) sees Jackie going to war with The
Brotherhood, the self-proclaimed rightful owners of The Darkness, a par-
asitic supernatural entity.

The big change here is that the gameplay has been overhauled by new
designer Digital Extremes, which results in much smoother controls. In ad-
dition, skills customization is also more expansive, allowing players to
adapt their talents to ttieir preferred style of play, be that firearms-based
combat or supernatural ass-kicking with The Darkness’ array of abilities
that allow you to tear your opponents limb from limb. As well, both guns
and Darkness skills can be “quad-wielded” in tandem, resulting in creative
and very violent methods of enemy disposal, including decapitations,
chest-bursting and “wishboning” your opponents - yes, that's as nasty as
it sounds. And now instead of having multiple homunculi-like “darWin^s"
at your disposal, you only have one - but he’s much more efficient at taking
down opponents.

Also added to the roster: the multiplayer co-op "Vendettas” mode, where
one to four players can take on the roles of new Darkness wielders (free-
lance enforcers working for Jackie) to bring down The Brotherhood.

Whether online or off, gameplay is fast and bloody.

Then ttiere’s the visual re-do: the grimier "real-life” look of the previous
game has been replaced by illustration-style cel-shading. The graphic
makeover is a perfect match for the sequel’s more bombastic tone -
the occult-enhanced “black ops” Brotherhood and the storyline (written
by Darkness comic scribe Paul Jenkins) have more overt pulp/paranormal
overtones than the first game's armies of mobsters and goons. It's also in-
credibly profane, with multiple expletives, sexual situations and deaths
that would make the gang from Mortal Kombata little queasy.

It’s been a five-year wait, but very much worth it. Just be sure to keep
this one out of the hands of the kiddies.

RON MCKENZIE

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I I i n ^wprwiiift^i n H H T' r i n yri y I I ' n ^pi >'i T r

T he ravager set to work; seizing a sleeping soldier, he savagely tore at him,
gnashed at his bone joints, swallovifed huge chunks of flesh, sucked the
blood from his veins, and had soon eaten all of the dead man...even his
hands and feet."

It's hard to believe that the preceding quote, detailing a demon’s attack on a
Scandinavian Mead Hall in almost a "torture porn" fashion, is from the first epic
poem in English (transcribed from the rich oral traditions of our past) - a work
that’s been mandatory reading in high schools and university literature courses
for decades.

Then again, if you delve into the beginnings of any art form,
you'll often find works steeped in the horror genre. The great
Greek dramas, from kill-your-own-kids Medea to poke-your-
own-eyeS'Out Oedipus, were all works of homor. One of the
first movies ever made was Thomas Edison’s adaptation of
Frankenstein in 1 91 0. Medieval European balladry featured Sir
Halewyn the Miserable, a supernatural serial
killer who enjoyed slicing out hearts with a
sickle. So it shouldn’t be too shocking that
Beowulf, from which the above excerpt is
taken (chapter 11), just happens to be a pure,
unabashed horror story.

Rrst written down in approximately 1000
AD in Old English - although it’s really English
in name only (“monster" is spelled "gegiceca"
and pronounced auglatcha) - Beowulf is 3182
verses long and divided into three main
episodes, each dealing with the eponymous
hero’s triumph over a particular monster,
namely Grendel (the aforementioned demon),

Grendel's mother and a dragon. Along the way. sea monsters are also battled,
while ogres, elves and giants are alluded to, as well.

Initially, to the modern reader, the most striking aspect of the narrative is
the sheer power of its language. But what makes the work resonate so
deeply is how the poet adroitly deals with the concepts of exile, revenge,
honour, faith, strength, bravery and war. (Grendel. a cannibal and a deformed
echo of humanity, is possibly a metaphor for ignoble warfare). Also quite af-
fecting is the elegiac ending, which owes itself to the author’s awareness
that the Germanic culture of Beowulf is dying.

It’s a dense work that utilizes gruesomely Intense imagery, and in the wrong
translator’s hands the powerful story can seem simply ridiculous. For instance,
"gnashed at his bone joints” has been officially translated as “the bone frame
bit.” "bit into his bone locks,” “bit into his bone-lappings” and, astonishingly, “bit
his bone-prison.” Consequently, while Beowulf ottereti a complex world of
endless questions for scholars (Who was the poet? Who transcribed it?
Where and when was it written down? Is the mix of Anglo-Saxon pa-
^ ' ganism and Roman Christianity intended or the result of med-

.tBeowuLf ▼

dling/editing?), the poem’s barbaric splendour was on the verge of slipping
off into obscurity, and it would have, had it not been for a lecture given in
1936 by an Oxford professor, one J.R.R. Tolkien. He argued that pedantic
academics had devoted too much time to gabbing around the poem but
had not spent enough time appreciating it simply as the profound work of
art it is. His talk gained infamy and. In turn, helped expose the tale to a
much wider audience.

Beowulfs lasting influence cannot be understated. Shades of it can be
found in everything from the King Arthur legend to Tolkien's own Lord of
the Rings (the term "Middle Earth" first appeared in the epic
poem, and Gollum could pass for Grendel’s cousin), but perhaps
more importantly it can be argued that Grendel was the proto-
typical boogeyman; a hulking beast
against which human weapons were in-
effective, who had no qualms about
killing, maiming and eating men. Ele-
ments of Grendel can be found in a whole
host of modern horror villains, from the
oversized monsters of creature features
to slasher killers, whose Innate ability to
survive being shot, stabbed, etc., with
little or no damage to their person
seems to hearken directly back to Be-
owulfs first antagonist.

Interestingly, for a work painstakingly
copied out manually at the dawn of English,
Beowulf is more popular in today’s hyper-
kinetic, electronic, acronym-heavy world
than it ever was even in its own time, and
the multiple modern adaptations bear that
out.

Benjamin Bagby Is internationally
renowned for his live performances where
he recites it in the original tongue. Michael
Crichton (Jurassic ParK) wrote a New York
r/mes best-seller based upon it, which be-
came the movie The 13th Warrior. Other re-
cent film adaptations include one starring
Christopher Lambert (Highlandei), one with Sarah Polley (2004’s Dawn
of the Deadi, as well as the Robert Zemeckis motion-capture version
starring Anthony Hopkins and Angelina Jolie. There are dozens of
graphic novel versions, and new verse translations continue to make
it onto best-seller lists today.

It was the first of its kind, it was one of the last of its kind; but first ]
and foremost, it was, and is, a bedrock horror story. i '■ f

MICHAEL MITCHELL ^ M

this motion picture is also available in a version rated r , — '
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Intense Violence
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Sexual Themes
Strong tangihi(|c

-ASH' character from "ARMY OF DARKNESS' is licensed from Metro-GoWwyn-Mayer Studios he. LOliJPOP CHAINSAW ©WD^WA eAM^GRAffiflOPPER MANUBCTJRE. Distributed by
Home Enteitainmeil Inc. All other trademarfrs and copyrights are the pnxierty of their respeefrve owners AH nghts reserved. '^ySo^" and-tlie^ ’ Fpily logo are registetEd trademarls of Sorw
Erfrertahmerfr Ire. The PlayStation Netvvodrt^isa service rnark of Sony Computer EntertainrTierit Inc.AII other irademaiKsandcoi^r^ are the proper^ ctf fret respective owners. AB rights reservdj
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’ Astkcharacler stun is an in-game item. Internet connection required to access download^ content, inflatable chainsaw is a physical iteiri.,Otfe&may be discontinued to at any bme or subject to
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•i ■ WWW.EBG AMES.CA

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